Anna Gregor in the Retracted Age: A Conversation

 Install, Double Space, D. D. D. D. (Photo Credit: Rachel Kuzma)

By JAN DICKEY June, 2024

The arched windows of old cathedrals burn in oil glazes of Indian Yellow and Green-gold. Glowing flames are framed within paste-white grounds of paint, imitating studio walls shadow-crossed from too many track lights. A glassy reflection in the work, like a thin window pane is hung in the center of each of the seven intimately sized compositions; but the glass is actually a clear, viscous paint medium. It sinks a millimeter into the white ground, yet also appears to rest on top–perched on trompe-l'œil black screws. There’s an imitation of a torn piece of Scotch blue tape on the largest painting, the musca depicta, or “painted fly”* of our retracted age.

I first saw Anna Gregor’s paintings at a group show called Old Mistresses, curated by Rebecca Bird (painter and director of Brooklyn art space, Tomato Mouse) for the September 2021 Spring/Break Art Show in NYC. Rebecca billed it on instagram as “a show about painting.” I was completely mystified by the small, haunting paintings of shadows in hallways that were Anna’s contribution to the show. I was made all the more curious when Rebecca explained how she practically had to steal these paintings out of Anna's studio, and was trying to further coax her into a solo presentation at Tomato Mouse some day. Anna is a perfectionist, with deep integrous feelings of responsibility toward the objects she considers finished “Paintings, with a capital P.”

I rarely reach out to strangers whose paintings I’ve seen out in the wild to try and see more, since it can be such an ordeal to schedule things in NYC. I sent Anna a DM anyway and about a year later we traded studio visits. Since that time I have considered Anna a friend and colleague, so what follows is less of an “objective” journalistic endeavor than a record of an ongoing conversation around contemporary painting, and how we both relate to it. I would also like to credit a conversation I had with another Brooklyn-based painter, Danny Sobor, who has written an excellent, unpublished (as of the time of this writing) article that also explores the idea of the ghost image, or what we are calling here: the “Retracted Image.”

 After Fra Angelico (To What Can I Pray?), 2024, Oil paint on canvas, 14x11 inches
 

Jan Dickey: This is a whole new body of work. Where did all these new paintings come from?

Anna Gregor: They all grew out of learning how to guild glass last summer. There’s this ancient technique called verre églomisé which involves applying gold leaf to glass with a gelatin size to create a mirror. I first saw it in the Met where they have these Byzantine medallions done with this process, and I thought: “I need to learn how to do that.” I started making gilded glass compositions and later started using them as still lives, of a sort. The glass pieces are at once their own compositional object and a reflection of the studio space around them. It’s this weird collapse of space that I find really interesting. Using them as still lives was the starting point for all seven pieces in my show, Double Space, at D. D. D. D..

J: The idea of construction has been in your work for quite a while. Literally, there were skeleton frames of buildings, bricks, boards, and nails in the work that you were making before, including the gilded works that became still lives. Those artworks created a visual analogy between building a painting and building actual buildings. So, in the new paintings, seeing a reflection of the studio where you've made the work follows a thread of being referential toward the making process.

That said, since gilded glass still lives aren’t perfect mirrors, they facilitated a softening of the edges in most of the representational elements we see in your seven works for Double Space. The skeleton frames and the reflections of the studio all blur into a glowing yellow light.

The premise of our chat today is to connect your work to an ongoing conversation you and I have been having about contemporary painting. Let’s cut to the chase, there's a lot of representational painting happening right now that has a soft, blurry appearance. I’ve been going around Manhattan and Brooklyn explaining to people that you’ve coined a new term for this: the Retracted Image. I love the term. The images retract from our vision. They recoil from our gaze. They relax our eye muscles, tense from being too online. Up until now, we have been having a conversation about the Retracted Image in reference to other people’s work. Now I want to know if you see your new paintings as Retracted Images.
 

 Hodegetria (Our Lady of the Way), 2024, Oil paint on canvas, 14x11 inches
 

A: I think you’re right to connect these current works to my past works under the idea of construction. I’m very interested in both the material and the thought process that goes into constructing the images, on the part of the artist and the viewer. The viewer has to reconstruct the painting for it to be not just an object but a Painting, with a capital P. The imperfections of the gilding, and the etched drawing on top of that, all further complicate and obfuscate the reflected image. That does relate to this conversation we’ve been having about the Retracted Image.

I scroll through my instagram and odds are I’ll see some blurry, airbrushy, or solventy image. Usually of a figure, landscape, or a still life––the traditional genres of painting. I’m typically really drawn to it, because it tends to be a pleasurable image with soft and harmonious colors. But I am also so skeptical, because it seems easy and quick to make an image of something that is not detailed, just on a technical level. That quickness is convenient for the market, and the instagram algorithm, and it seems to betray a lack of commitment to putting something out in the world. I also have this thought that it is related to our being accustomed to filters on social media, which cover up imperfections. And this betrays a fear of detail, of wrinkles and pores, a feeling which social media has fostered.

  Double Space, 2024, Oil paint, rabbit skin glue, marble dust, muslin on wood panel, 36 x 24 inches
 

J: Something that really jumped out to me from what you just said was about subject matter: figure, still life, and landscape. There’s a cultural interest right now in the traditional. First of all, the market is fixated on painting, a very traditional form; but I also see subject matter in painting trending toward the traditional as you said. Still, there is a self-consciousness about being seen as simply reenacting the past. The blurriness of the paintings could be a way of engaging with the past, while also keeping it at a distance.

There’s been a robust revival of figuration in painting. Maybe the Retracted Image is also a way of edging back toward abstraction, while still holding onto the figure, or the representational image in general. I think especially since the 2016 presidential election there’s been a feeling that if you aren’t depicting something specifically referential then you’re avoiding engaging with the problems of the day. So, this shy creep toward abstraction is kind of awkward and funny; it feels flirtatious.

A: What I’m really wary of in my own paintings––something I want to avoid––is nostalgia. What I am skeptical of in many Retracted Image paintings is this sense of sepia-toned nostalgia. As if things were better back then, which I see to be a disowning of the present. Paintings are essentially present. You have to be looking at one. It's a one-on-one experience.

I like that you bring up “traditional,” however, because I think a great deal about the tradition of painting and the narratives that surround it. I am so drawn to early Christian icons. A painting that is a portal to something beyond. A material embodiment that is here now, of something that is immaterial and out of reach.There’s definitely this, if you want to call it, flirtation with a painting tradition of Christian icons, but I want to find a contemporary correlate. I want to know how painting functions as a portal to the divine today. Especially when I have no idea what could be divine.

  Groundless, 2024, Oil paint on canvas, 11 x 14 inches
 

J: I’ve been thinking through in my own work the physical stuff of matter and how we experience it through light. So I want to hear more about the glass and the act of seeing the image through the glass.

A: Pretty fundamental to how I think about and make paintings is the distinction between the material and the immaterial. I think light is the perfect visual representation of immateriality. Going back to Plato and the allegory of the cave: the prisoners are seeing shadows cast on a cave wall, but they think they are seeing reality, truth. But truth is outside of the cave, and ultimately in the allegory it is the light, the Sun.

The experience of material in light is fundamental to how I’m working. When I'm looking at the still life, I’m noticing how light interacts with the gilded glass pieces: light penetrates the glass, reflects from the gold, casts shadows on the wall. So there are all these different materials that are being represented by me in paint, which is its own material with its own properties of translucency, opacity, gloss, and matteness.

This gloopy, viscous pigmented paste transcends its own material limitations when it is transformed into something somewhat recognizable. It’s a transcendence of mere materiality through organization into an idea. For me, paintings are ideas. The material is the occasion for a mind to gain access to this immaterial idea—a very Platonic or Christian way of thinking. But I’m not a Platonist and I’m not Christain, so there’s no unifying structure of meaning that would allow me to produce a non-fractured, or perhaps un-retracted, image. Rather there’s this shifting simultaneity of information that is competing and that I am constantly trying to make sense of, both in my world and in my paintings.

J: I read Ninth Street Women (Mary Gabriel, 2017) earlier this year, which focuses on the Abstract Expressionist movement––the Depression, WWII, and post-war cultural environment in New York City. This was a time and place of rampant existentialism, when a lot of horrifying and disillusioning shit had been experienced. There seems to have been a feeling that the only way to express what was going on was to do away with, or at least obfuscate, representation.

I think that we’re living in a world where it's increasingly harder to believe in any kind of truth because we’re watching so much truth get constructed before our eyes, then blatantly disseminated and believed. It makes me not want to ascribe to anything because it makes me feel like I am part of some kind of brainwashing operation no matter what I decide to believe in. Not to mention all the persistent horrors in this world perpetuated with impunity by democratically elected governments. And I hate to say “maybe we’re in a time where everything seems meaningless”, because it probably always seems that way, but I wonder if there’s this combination of factors feeding into a collective mindset where to have a clear and specific position is to be a sucker. To be on someone’s newsletter, to be giving campaign contributions, only to get further screwed over.

 Windowless Monad, 2024, Oil paint, rabbit skin glue, marble dust, muslin on wood panel, 6 x 12 inches
 

A: I definitely think it is part of the general cultural consciousness. This sense of information overload, disorientation, powerlessness, unintelligibility. My instagram feed is insane: platform shoes, Dachshunds (weiner dogs), and incredible violence going on in Gaza. There’s this whiplash that we are accustomed to everywhere. There are TV screens on the subways now. So you can’t even escape the flashing of ads when you’re trying not to make eye contact with people on the subway. I imagine what we’re feeling now is similar to the post-war attitude that manifested itself in abstraction.

Except, and I don't want to be too depressing, but I think that our generation and younger have totally lost faith in the power of the image. Everything is being documented and, on top of that, we know how manipulable images are. Any claim to the truth that images once had seems to be undercut. At the same time abstraction is no longer something new or unknown. You go into Walmart––the decorative aisle––and you can buy something that looks pretty similar to a DeKooning or Klee. It feels like any one way of painting in itself doesn’t have the utopian promise of making sense of something, or opening up new vistas.

Which is why I’m really committed to the idea of Painting as prolonged and effort-full. A painting is proof that someone felt like it was worth it to commit their time and energy, smearing paint all over something, wrestling with this material in order to make meaning. That desire for expression and communication requires a kind of reciprocal engagement on the part of the viewer. When I see Retracted Images I often doubt that there is even enough figuring-out in them to warrant my effort. It takes labor to understand something. 

Anna Gregor

J: I’ve been thinking about this a bit, what you brought up about labor, because every once in a while I make a painting that someone tells me is done. I see what they’re seeing and I think it could possibly be done; but I haven’t really spent enough time with it yet.

This kind of deeper and more durational struggle with the object I think is really important in a moment when images are rapidly becoming easier to generate with technology. A computer is now able to instantly do something that we have often confused with profound art, which is a remixing of the past. I don’t want to go on record as being anti-remix, I just think we have confused things that are comfortably referential with a true rearrangement of cultural thought. To be able profoundly rearrange human thought patterns, and our own expectations, artists need to be present on earth and sensitive to life as a human. I think this feeling of human presence in the image will be very important, because image generation is becoming automatic. They’ll be fun and even interesting AI images, but they’ll be essentially empty.

A: I sympathize with what you’re saying about people telling you your paintings are done, while you feel that you haven’t put yourself into it enough––or they don’t have presence. I tend to anthropomorphize each of my paintings and consider them beings. And sometimes one of them is just stillborn. They are not done until they feel like they can exist apart from me––no matter how much somebody likes it. It’s nice obviously. But the painting makes itself, to supernaturalize it.

Getting to know a painting, or really seeing a painting is like getting to know a person. Sure you might like or dislike a person at first glance, but paintings like humans reveal themselves over time. You can’t really look at a painting––certainly not on instagram––but even within the behavioral conventions of a museum where you are basically scrolling through the gallery. You gotta take a chair and sit in front of it for a couple of hours before you start to see it. It's truly stunning what reveals itself to you. You can be looking at something for an hour and half and just now realize there’s this thing you didn’t see that was so obvious.

But you do have to trust a painting before you decide to commit to hours of your life. Whatever “presence” is, this suggestion that someone has put a lot into it, is a pretty good indicator that you’ll get something out of it. The effort is reciprocated. The structure between painted object and viewer is very similar to the structure of a conversation between two people, in the sense that both parties are listening to the other and responding.

To link this back to this contemporary feeling that we don’t know what’s real, or that we are skeptical of committing to a clear perspective, I feel like looking at a painting is a microcosmic instance of committing to a shared world. Looking at a painting is not merely subjective, there is a thing in front of you and it has properties that––yes––you are filtering through your subjectivity; but it's still there. And especially looking at a painting with another person. It's practicing a kind of intersubjectively-determined reality. You’re both looking at something, you’re saying I see that and that person is saying no I see this; and you’re figuring out what you can both agree on is there. While we can’t all agree on some objective truth in the world given to us by scientists, or God, there’s at least this kind of grass roots conversational way of trying to share a world that I think plays out in front of paintings.

J: I like that you are seeing paintings as an invitation to build a reality. At first glance I had a sense of these new paintings as looking like buildings that are being broken down, of becoming deconstructed and ghostly; but the more we have looked and talked the more I’m also seeing worlds being created in them. Created through light. Like in the 2010 blockbuster movie Inception, we are at the lowest dream level creating and destroying worlds.

A: It's not like we’re starting from scratch. Painting in particular is such a traditional art, it carries the burden of a narrative in which it was thought to adequately portray the world, the narrative of imitation. And it carries a more recent narrative of the teleological progress of modernism, from representation towards pure abstraction. Both of those narratives have kind of failed; but what we have left over is this material––paint the material––and we have the painting techniques, styles, and the various technologies of perspective. We can use all that to rebuild or build a new vocation for painting. That is different from this kind of postmodern juxtaposition of style––David Salle or whatever––that an AI computer could do. There is a kind of collage logic in my new work––a fracturing, a reflection, and, yes, a retraction. But there is also a real desire to grab from the past––grab traditional gesso and oil paint––and figure out a new configuration that isn’t meaningless or hopeless. WM

Anna Gregor, Double Space
Was on view at D. D. D. D., May 3 - June 9
179 Canal St. Ste. 3B
New York, NY 10002

*credit to Rebecca Bird for the painters tape/“painted fly” observation