Background
With a primary focus on still life painting, Gray regularly uses historical tropes and frameworks as a point of departure for simultaneous bodies of work.
Casey Gray has lived in California all his life, growing up in San Jose and finally settling in San Francisco after college and graduate school. He has exhibited his work extensively across the United States in numerous group and solo exhibitions, and has collaborated with brands such as Nike, Converse and Pabst Blue Ribbon amongst others on special projects.
With a primary focus on still life painting, Gray regularly uses historical tropes and frameworks as a point of departure for simultaneous bodies of work. In his eyes the picture plane acts as a space for reconciling conflicting mutual interests of realism, formal abstraction, texture and flatness. He translates this idea into different series quite literally, with bulletin boards, marble ledges, curiosity cabinets and tabletops taking on the role of “stage” for disparate subject matter to interact upon and play out narratives.
As an avid skateboarder since the age of twelve, Gray’s aesthetic is heavily influenced by the counter culture attitude of the West Coast. His works are characterized by his exclusive use of aerosol paints, his expansive palette of bright colour, and his near trompe l’oeil sense of realism. Subject matter is collected distributed into the works based on formal qualities, and through associations with past experience, memory, and hopes for the future. His goal is to create a symbolic visual language that illuminates the loss of context in today’s visual culture, and to explore the fluidity of personal experience that is the contemporary landscape.
