Bio

Andy Gambrell

Andy Gambrell is an American abstract painter.

The artist was valedictorian of Palmetto High School in 1997 and studied painting at the highly selective residential summer program of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He earned a BA in both Studio Art and Art History from Furman University, where he had a full-ride scholarship and was awarded the Flowers Art Medal in 2001. He earned his MFA in Painting from the University of Miami, where he had a teaching assistantship and full-tuition waiver. Gambrell was commencement speaker for the UM graduate school in 2006. The artist supplemented his graduate studies with a painting residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2004.

Gambrell’s art has been exhibited alongside work by historically significant artists such as Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Ruth Asawa, Walter Darby Bannard, Ilya Bolotowsky, Frank Hursh, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Irwin Kremen, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, Will Henry Stevens, Jack Tworkov, Kara Walker, and many others.

His work has been presented in many venues including: Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center (NC), Clara Lovett Museum (AZ), Center for Visual Communication (FL), Lowe Art Museum (FL), MOCA North Miami (FL), Greenville County Museum (SC), Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (CA), Dorsch Gallery (FL), Locust Projects (FL), Swan Coach House Gallery (GA), Blue Spiral Gallery (NC), Red Chamber Gallery (Hong Kong), Blue Lotus Gallery (HK), and many others including university galleries.

Gambrell’s relationship to the art world is very much colored by his working-class roots. For him, art is an affront to the difficulties of life, and teaching is a social responsibility to equip people with the knowledge and skills to live their best lives. Since 2005, he has developed extensive university curricula in painting, drawing, design, color theory, art theory, and art history. He taught for the University of Miami, Elizabeth City State University, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Furman University, SCAD – Hong Kong, and Northern Arizona University before joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, where he served as area coordinator for art foundations and currently teaches painting, drawing, color theory, and the BFA capstone seminar.

The artist also served as Director of the University of Miami's College of Arts and Sciences Gallery and was the founding director of UM's Wynwood Project Space. Gambrell supports the arts outside of the academy through advocacy projects such as founding a gallery in rural South Carolina to provide a platform for artists outside of urban centers. A proponent of experiencing art in-person, he occasionally writes art criticism and has authored reviews of exhibitions in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Switzerland, and Hong Kong.

For Gambrell, the history of art is a living, ongoing visual conversation between the artists of the past and present. His practice and the development of his work have been shaped by working relationships with other artists. In the early years of his career, he worked with outsider visionary apocalyptic painter, William Thomas Thompson in the spiritually charged foothills of Appalachia. Ironically, it was Gambrell’s rigorous engagement with the beliefs of his upbringing that led to his philosophical move away from religion. This intellectual shift from a worldview dependent on explanation to a worldview informed by direct experience was pivotal in his development as an abstract artist.

In 2003, Gambrell moved to Miami to work with Walter Darby Bannard and became part of an underground community of serious abstract painters. There was a rich studio dialogue between modern masters such as Bannard, a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction, Jules Olitski, a legendary figure in color field painting, and mid-career artists working to advance abstraction outside the interest of the mainstream art world.

A fascination of Gambrell’s is the phenomenon of presence in painting. To the artist’s eye, this gestalt of visual ingredients manifests most elegantly in collage. He finds the work of Irwin Kremen to be exemplary regarding gestalt and presence. Gambrell visited Kremen's home to discuss collage in 2009 when he was a visiting assistant professor at Elizabeth City State University and Kremen was professor emeritus of clinical psychology at Duke University. Gambrell’s dialogue with Kremen and other alumni of Black Mountain College has led to the artist’s studio practice being recognized as an extension of the legacy of the historic school.

Gambrell’s work reflects a studio practice that is as informed by the best of the past as it is open to the best of the present. He explores experimental new technology, using a laser eyetracker to overcome unconscious bias in his abstract drawing, and partners with collaborators to expand his perspective, recently working with choreographer, Susan Gingrasso, to explore the intersection of painting and dance.

Gambrell’s paintings are a three-fold celebration of the world he sees, his experience of seeing it, and his process of distilling his esthetic emotion into a painted composition.

Home