GE Galería presents “Factor of Existence”, an exhibition by Polish Canadian artist James Verbicky. The opening reception will be on October 18th at GE Galería Monterrey.
Verbicky was born in 1973 and lived the majority of his early life in British Columbia before immigrating to the United States in the early 2000s. He struggled with legal status for many years before finally being awarded the ‘Extraordinary Ability’ Green card due to his extensive involvement with a wide range of museums, galleries, publications, nonprofit organizations, and phil- anthropic endeavors. In 2008, his work was selected for a 110 year-old juried exhibition at the Louvre with the Societie Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Shortly after his exhibition in Paris and finding inspiration among the maga- zine vendors that range along the Seine,Verbicky created the media paint- ings: complex and sculptural mixed media artworks that became his vessels for communicating about a society oversaturated by media. By utilizing rare historical content, including both obsolete and persisting brands and advertisements, as well as vintage graphics,Verbicky has constructed a large oeuvre of densely layered and unique compositions that ensnare the viewer by engaging the natural human proclivity to find order in chaos, to sort and assign meaning as a way to navigate the world.
In this process, he reminds the viewer that they are constantly being influenced. In 2014,Verbicky returned to paint on canvas with the ERA and Bhavanga series, which allowed him to transcend the barriers of paper collage with bands of hand-painted canvas, enamel script, classical imagery and crystallina.
At his core,Verbicky is a visual language manipulator, unsatisfied with deconstruction alone, he is driven forward by the process of reconstruction and the creation of a new, abstract visual language. In 2018, he expanded his vision further by venturing into the world of three dimensional monumental sculptural works, which build out into the environment and create a sensory experience beyond sight alone.
“I create feeds of information. I play with the tension be- tween how and why messages are comprehensible, and ex- amine the spectrum of awareness and ignorance. Media exists to sell products and to influence thought and behavior, and has become such a disturbingly deep undercurrent in the modern world that it often operates covertly in people’s lives. I take that material, which is sometimes current but often decades and sometimes centuries’ old and still as relevant as ever, and dissect it to form new messages of my own making. ”
- James Verbicky