Curwen Gallery
Arts Review – The predominant colours throughout this exhibition are shades of blue — lapis, aquamarine, slate-grey through to grey-grey, curiously reminiscent of Alfred Wallis’s coastal paintings of St Ives with their ink-blue ships and houses. Gibbs’s paintings are more or less abstract, though by this, his second one-man exhibition at the Curwen Gallery, there are hints of figuration — kitchen interiors and still lives, and the pervasive presence of an overhead lamp casting an unearthly glow overall. The works are in oils, chalk, charcoal and pencil on canvas, paper,... Read The Rest →
»Blowing hot and cold with the emotions«
Scotsman – Two shows at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh provide a considerable contrast in emotional temperature. Downstairs, Lucinda Mackay’s paintings conform to an Expressionist mode while, upstairs, cool New Works by Jonathan Gibbs have been conceived quietly and objectively in a Constructivist mode. Gibbs, who has previously exhibited with Demarco and the 369 Gallery, creates propositions that vary in scale but are always elegant and refined, reticent rather than Minimal and of a poetic quality that compounds a feeling of kinship — no more than that — with the... Read The Rest →
Scottish Gallery
TES – Lucinda Mackay & Jonathan Gibbs There is an immediate contrast upstairs in New Works by Jonathan Gibbs, a product of the Central School and the Slade. These cool and subtle compositions have their roots in the abstractions of British artists like Nicholson, or of the Bauhaus, like Klee. That the vein is far from exhausted is shown in his set of winter drawings. There has been a progression from rectangular themes to recent suggestions of fish shapes. Elements of recession are evoked by grids or overlapping planes. The... Read The Rest →
Galleries: Bringing out the voyeur in the viewer
Times – … Finally, a last chance — just until Saturday — to see a show of unusual delicacy, refinement and, for want of a better word, charm. And all — the paintings and the drawings anyway — completely and happily abstract. The artist is Jonathan Gibbs, last seen in London at the lamented Holsworthy Gallery, and he is non-representational in a way that very few of his generation (the early thirties) are: i.e., there is no appreciable indication of landscape lurking in the background of his works, not even... Read The Rest →
Unhealthy whiff of decay
369 Gallery – … An exhibition of abstract drawings and paintings by Jonathan Gibbs at the 369 Gallery is a very English affair wherein Constructivist improvisations, cool and intellectual, are given a decorative bias but subjected to discipline, nevertheless, by limiting media to conté chalk — black, white, sanguine — except for the odd introduction of experimental collage with silk screened fabric. His quiet and elegant propositions begin from that dynamic tension of straight lines in space one associates with Malevich though these are open to visitations from different systems... Read The Rest →