Gregory Edwards

Gregory Edwards (born January 19, 1981) is a contemporary artist who lives in New York City.

After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2003) he moved his studio to Brooklyn New York until April 2007 when he relocated to Frankfurt Germany. He attended Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.

Gregory Edwards has an upcoming solo show at the end of February 2016 at 47 Canal gallery in New York City at 291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002.

Gregory Edwards was included in the 2015 installment of Greater New York, at MoMA PS1.

Gregory Edwards was one of the first artists to show with 47 Canal gallery, which is a commercial art gallery started by Margaret Lee(artist/dealer) and Oliver Newton(dealer).

Margaret Lee first ran 179 Canal, an artist run project space at its namesake address, in which Gregory Edwards participated in a show titled Guilty Feet in 2010.

After 179 Canal had to give up its space, Lee partnered with Newton to co-run 47 Canal. 47 Canal moved spaces in 2014 but kept their name, and are now located at 291 Grand Street, in Manhattan, New York.

Gregory Edwards' work is informed by his lifelong interest in literature and every day visual culture. His use of words in his paintings signal universal themes that vacillate between being both meaningful and empty at once. Edwards' paintings also position themselves in a space between abstraction and realism in the sense that image making weaves in and out of cognition of subject matter. He works with concepts of visual unease and ideas that are at once simplistic and universal. Among his predecessors are artists like Michel Majerus who used abstraction and contemporary throw-away popular visual culture as important jumping off points in making work that straddles the world we live in with the conceptual ground of painting. Of his 2014 solo show, Artplaces wrote "The paintings recall the vintage aesthetic of MS PowerPoint and Word Art. The exhibition’s press release reports a few excerpts from a one hour audio meditation posted on YouTube in order to relieve negativity and stress in people; the words painted on the works’ surface – “INFORMATION”, “EMOTION”, “ATTRACTION”, “INNER CHILD” etc. – refer to the inspirational sloganeering of self-help culture."

In 2011 Edwards had his first solo show in New York at 47 Canal, which was the 2nd show ever in the gallery space.

This was followed by his second solo show in New York also at 47 Canal in 2014.

In 2015, Edwards was invited by curator Franklin Melendez to take part in an exhibition titled A Sentimental Education, at Galerie Andreas Huber in Vienna, Austria. The exhibition included Rosa Aiello, Uri Aran, Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Gregory Edwards, Lucas Michael, K.r.m. Mooney, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Bunny Rogers & Jasper Spicero, Edward Marshall Shenk, and Amalia Ulman.

In 2013 Edwards' work was included in DIS magazine's DISimages shoot with artist Bjarne Melgaard.

In December 2013, Christopher Bollen interviewed Gregory Edwards for a feature in Interview Magazine. This is an excerpt from their conversation:

"The question mark might serve as an entry point to the 32-year-old artist's ongoing interest in the push and pull between abstraction and representation, the open-ended sense of play in his wild, often ostentatious patterning and his rigid structural control, and flat, thinly applied surfaces. After all, a question mark added to any last word turns the work of interpretation onto the audience."

For a press release in 2006, Edwards' work was described by art historian and patron of the arts, Esme Watanabe in this quote: "Gregory Edwards shifts in and out of various modes of painting. Images are built out of autonomous systems that come from different perspectives, yet are held together by a basic empirical language."

In 2005 Edwards participated in the group show "Sugar and Stress" at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York, exhibiting two paintings: Future Primitive, and Nobody. Other New York group exhibitions include "Diversity + Self-Identity" at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, "Psychic Reality" (Bellwether Gallery, 2006), Participant Inc (2006), and "The Poster Project" at Printed Matter in 2006.

He also exhibited in Hamburg, Germany with Ritter & Staiff Gallery at HFBK Gallerie in a group show called "Post-Mass Audience Age"(2007).