Artist Talk: Aaron Gilbert
Fall 2026 Alex Katz Chair in Painting gives an artist talk about his work. Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979, Altoona, PA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Gilbert is known for depicting scenes from private everyday life while invoking the weight of institutional forces, setting intimate narratives against the fluorescent
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glow cast by the iconography of feudal late-stage technocapitalism. Gilbert’s paintings capture the visual framework of his Brooklyn microcosm and the characters that populate it with a hyper-specificity that advances from the social realism of Gustave Courbet, Otto Dix, and George Tooker, focusing on the transformative potential of individuals and love as a transcending power amid a social infrastructure dictated by commodity fetishism.