Gregory Malphurs

Gregory Malphurs, a Los Angeles based contemplative painter, explores new ways to perceive the subject of portraiture. His works are a deconstruction of emotions, colors, and inspirations reflecting life with its troubles and complications. The work reveals a universal bond of personal struggle — that life is a series of fragments we have to make sense of, our complexity of being.

Gregory (born 1966, United States) rejects the notion that an artist must meticulously reflect physical reality. Instead, he uses the human presence, ecstatically and complexly perceived, to reflect the condition of humanity while inviting the viewer’s ambivalence. With the belief that great art should challenge us to embrace our insecurities rather than hold a torch up to ideal forms, Gregory shares an experience of escapism to a reality where complexity feels oddly familiar.

The chaotic and clashing lines, colors and breakage in Gregory’s works might first appear as an artistic compulsion to destroy or fragment bodies and ideas. However, the deconstruction in his works actually stems from a need to understand, to go deep and look at the avoided corners of our consciousness, to make whole and heal. By brazenly acknowledging the convolution in all of us, Gregory hopes to make the statement ‘yeah we’re all fucked up, but we’re doing the best we can.’