TitleSelf-Portrait Shrine with Balancing Figure
Artist
Gregory Gillespie
(American, 1936 - 2000)
Date1999
MediumMixed media (paint, wire mesh, staples, and marker) on board
DimensionsOverall: 54 1/4 x 47 1/4 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 21, 2005
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Peggy Gillespie, 2005
Object number2005.32
Label TextGregory Gillespie's work is transgressive in many ways, combining elements of photorealism, Surrealism, early Italian Renaissance painting, eastern mysticism, and Catholic shrines. It ultimately defies classification. Gillespie initially studied at Cooper Union and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1962. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to study and work in Florence, Italy and was deeply affected by the work he saw in Europe including that of Masaccio and Northern Renaissance artists Bosch, Breugel, and Van Eyck. Early on in his career Gillespie became a consummate self-portraitist and his work often has a penetrating psychological content to it. Throughout his life Gillespie's work received critical acclaim, was collected by museums, was included in several Whitney Biennials and in 1977 was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum. While he remained something of an art world outsider, he was elected to associate membership in the National Academy in 1957, finally becoming a full Academician in 1994."Self-Portrait with Balancing Figure" is a complex late work that includes a self-portrait and references not only the artist's earlier shrine paintings from the 1960s, but also his interest is eastern mysticism through the inclusion of the floating figure. The balancing figure, half-male and half-female, was used in several of Gillespie's paintings as a symbolic representation of the competing forces that keep us in balance and out of balance, both physically and psychologically. The disconnected head is an unusual image, but the artist often cut out figures he had painted (heads of himself and others) and would place them in larger paintings. These and other objects in his work serve in a mysteriously fetishistic and often narrative context. In this case, he chose to keep it there to represent himself in a way both vulnerable, cut-off, and yet looking out with the lightest ironic smile. This was one of the artist's last works as he sadly took his own life in 2000.
