Alfredo Gisholt: Rituals of Perception

February 20 through May 15, 2021

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Rituals of Perception, an exhibition featuring paintings and works on paper by Alfredo Gisholt. This grand solo exhibition encompasses the entire gallery. The exhibition can be seen online through the gallery’s Viewing Room. Installation and artwork images can be seen through the gallery’s Virtual Slide Show and website. A Virtual Artist Talk and Walking Tour will take place during the exhibition. Questions or interest in specific artworks can be addressed by email, phone or “By Appointment” at Deborah Colton Gallery. The Gallery hours remain Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 5:30 pm. The exhibition is in conjunction with Forma 110 – Mariana Valdes Art Promotion.

The paintings and works on paper in the exhibition, Rituals of Perception, are Alfredo Gisholt’s response to two places: the studio and the landscape in the seacoast of Maine where he has spent much time. These two places provide Gisholt with the subject and the structure from which he builds, configures and reconfigures spaces into new pictorial realities. The transformation occurs through the accumulation of visual experiences: the light moving across the room, the clouds shifting in the sky, the pile of objects in a corner, the ebb and flow of the tide.

With his studio being an interior space, and the landscape being an exterior one, the duality of interior and exterior space is an allusion to internal and external personal experience. The dialogue between both, through the act of seeing and responding, becomes a metaphor from which imagination can transform the subject.

Goya has for many years been an important influence on Gisholt’s work due to Goya’s willingness to take on and speak of all aspects of the human experience. Since Goya titled one of the etchings from the series The Disasters of War, “I saw it” (Yo lo ví), his claim to have seen it has made a lasting impression on Gisholt. The importance of seeing “it,“ whether it be the landscape or a corner in the studio, Gisholt becomes fully engaged in this ritual of perception. Seeing and looking at the world, using paint and material to be the evidence of the experience allows Gisholt to imbue each painting with a physical and emotional reality that contain its meaning.

Alfredo Gisholt was born in Mexico City. He attended the Academia de San Carlos, has a BFA from Florida International University and an MFA from Boston University. Gisholt has had solo exhibitions at CUE Foundation, NYC; Forma110 Gallery and Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston; University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor; and Recinto Project Room, Mexico City. Alfredo Gisholt’s debut at Deborah Colton Gallery was in 2015, with his powerful solo exhibition that also encompassed the entire gallery, Alfredo Gisholt: Canto y Calvera.

Gisholt has been featured in Beer with a Painter, Hyperallergic, Painter’s Table and The Brooklyn Rail. He has exhibited in group shows at Park Place Gallery, NYC; Museo Morelense de Arte Contemporaneo Juan Soriano, Cuernavaca; Museo de Arte Popular, Mexico City; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, among others. Gisholt teaches at Brandeis University and RISD and has been a visiting artist at the Vermont Studio Center, University of Houston, Fashion Institute of Technology and Boston University. He lives and works in Boston.

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance and conceptual future media installations.