Celia Gerard

"Gerard’s fierce, crumpled ceramics reflect the hijacked geometry of their making; tears, indents, drips, and folds freeze in time to create each piece’s soft, seamful scaffolding, a kind of intuitive architecture that extends the careful linework of her paintings into three dimensions. There’s a corporeal quality to her work in porcelain, which doesn’t so much evoke the body as recall it through touch, simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing the complicated longing inherent to intimacy. Latent violence also bubbles under the surface of these sculptures—Gerard’s interventions sizzle in their stillness. A graduate of the New York Studio School and Harvard University, Gerard has exhibited widely and taught at Bard, Swarthmore, Pratte, Columbia and SVA."

"The shape of Celia Gerard’s studio is akin to an isosceles triangle whose apex has been leveled. It is a slightly irregular shape, but with a door on one end, a window at the other and a set of walls connecting base to foregone-tip, its geometric irregularity recedes beneath the structural logic of a building within which this little polygon fits neatly. When I imagine an image generated by changes in the layout of this building—small studios merging; larger ones being subdivided—I see fluctuating spatial relationships defined within a set of unchanging parameters. Older forms become ghosted beneath newly constructed arrangements that arise as they are needed. There is a natural order that underlies this apparent chaos; the question is how does one find that natural order? How does a person cultivate the ability to see the logical operations that give shade and shape to what may otherwise appear tangled and arbitrary?"

"Two gallery shows of contemporary art in Manhattan bring geometry and tactility together with vibrant results. New York–based artist Celia Gerard is exhibiting her signature large-scale mixed media drawings alongside relief sculptures in ceramic and bronze at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea. At Fox Gallery on the Upper West Side, Greek artist Eozen Agopian adds thread and fabric to her abstract paintings. Large and small-scale works by Ms. Agopian fill two rooms of the salon-style gallery. Both artists use the pictorial language of geometric abstraction to take on the mantle of Cubism.

In Ms. Gerard’s drawings, triangles appear and disappear in transparent veils of muted hues that press toward and away from the picture plane. Black lines zigzag playfully across the page, creating scalene triangles in “Ghost Bird,” 2016. Translucent layers of aqueous blues cover large areas of the composition, delineating white and pale-yellow birdlike forms. Ms. Gerard achieves formal tension here by combining soft, barely-there atmospheric color with resolute, geometric clarity. Her abstracted birds in flight recall Georges Braque’s iconic “oiseaux,” a recurring symbol in the Cubist master’s late work."

"There’s a quiet complexity to the art of New York painter and sculptor Celia Gerard, whose interdisciplinary work explores shape, line, and the blurring of color through abstractly geometric responses to surroundings; it’s a repackaging and reimagining of a landscape in puzzle piece format. Nine months out of the year, Gerard works from New York City, where she balances her own artwork and upcoming shows with teaching at Pratt, School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. For the remaining months, she retreats to quiet Wainscott, NY, in the farmhouse she shares with her partner Mark, where — in between walks around the neighborhood and to the nearby farm stand— she cranks out work from a backyard studio. Just as the seasons started to change (and on perhaps the only rainy day of the season), we visited Celia at home to discuss her art-driven upbringing, her upcoming projects, and the concepts that inform her ongoing work."

"Celia Gerard is an artist for whom two sticks of charcoal, a bit of white paint, and a strong sheet of paper is plenty of material. "Line Quality" could be her mantra, and looking at her works one can see why. Gerard's abstract compositions are built on geometric foundations of linear marks that may be subtle or bold but are always decisive. While her solo exhibition, "Lost at Sea," was being hung, ArtSlant editor Charlie Schultz paid Gerard a visit to discuss her newest body of work."

"Celia Gerard's mixed-media works hang in a balance of solidity and transparency, sculpture and drawing, as she finds a way to dig deeper into space.

"The eight compositions on display at the Sears-Peyton Gallery are a continuation of a body of work. “The work started when I was studying at the [New York] Studio School,” Gerard told The Daily Beast Thursday night at the opening of her new show, Lost at Sea. “I was working in low relief… and I realized that I wasn’t able to go as deep [into the space] as I wanted to,” she said, mentioning her formal training as a sculptor. “So I moved to drawing out of necessity.”"

"Gerard’s abstract, geometical works in black and white have the power of making a viewer stay. “It’s amazing how they unfold,” said my friend, and I agreed. The triangles, spheres, and cones open into landscapes and unknown worlds in deep space. What is really uncanny about the works is that they unfold the viewer, waking up the energies in the body and opening the mind and heart. I felt like I could see and feel the ongoing search in the work, and it had the effect of calling to search along with the artist. Gerard’s work woke me up, yet made me feel very concentrated and still, like looking inside a vast crystal or up at a mountain, or inside myself. It gave me a feeling of nostalgia for places I have never travelled, a longing for a quality or state that is still unknown yet essential…home."

"In his seminal essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the French artist’s painterly process, of how vacillating fields of chiseled brushstrokes simultaneously defined and questioned the objects at hand. Merleau-Ponty concluded that for Cezanne “‘conception’ [could not] precede ‘execution.’” The results, rigorously analytical and forever skeptical, set into motion the idea of the canvas as a public accounting of an artist’s tussle with uncertainty.

"Having filtered its way through Modernism—roughly speaking, from Cubism to Giacometti to Action Painting to any number of artists eager to flaunt their egos and erasers—“Cezanne’s Doubt” has become as much a cliché as any other approach to art-making. That is, until someone comes along and demonstrates why it is, in fact, viable and vital. Celia Gerard’s black-and-white mixed media drawings, at Sears-Peyton Gallery, remind us that tradition is for the taking should an artist have the gumption to follow through on it."

Celia Gerard featured in Works & Conversations, The Precision of the Artist, No. 17

"It was through contributing editor Jane Rosen that the work of Celia Gerard came to my attention. Gerard’s abstract, geometrical works immediately struck a chord with me in a way that remains mysterious. If asked to describe what that is, I can only fall back on the word poetic, a quality with no fixed rules. The sculpture of David Nash comes to mind as having this elusive quality, or the work of Martin Puryear. Somehow, one’s feeling is engaged. It’s interesting that it’s the work of two sculptors that comes to mind first."