AB NY Gallery in East Hampton is holding an opening on April 30, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM for the exhibition “2 Brothers-in-Law: An Artist & Brain Surgeon.” In this show two artists with notably different backgrounds and styles challenge their canvases to express the extended notion of concerns and ideas we meet each day with. The show will feature new work by artists Dr. Jeff Arle and William Quigley as it celebrates their birthdays alongside a series of paintings by Dr. Arle exploring the evolution of language and the currency of time.
Dr. Jeff Arle is a neurosurgeon living and working in Boston, Massachusetts affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area. He has written nine books, published endless research in neuroscience and neuromodulation and is also a passionate outdoorsman pursuing high altitude mountaineering, dogsledding in the arctic and sailing. AB NY Gallery will show Dr. Arle’s work to the public for the first time since he began his studio practice during his MD-PhD program in 1988.
With this body of paintings which Dr. Arle describes as “Grid Works,” he attempts to move the needle in another direction in terms of evolving aspects of thought.
Dr. Arle explained, “I was a ‘biopsychology’ major in college back when the term ‘neuroscience’ was still somewhat in its infancy – now even up to 30 percent of undergraduates claim they are neuroscience majors I think. But the critical thing to me was that I was interested in what makes us who we are, and that is arguably ‘thought’ and the rest of the workings of our nervous systems. And I was interested in complexity and complex interconnected systems. I was a little ahead in mathematics at a young age and I also found things like train layouts and subway systems fascinating. Ultimately, I am a hands-on person though. I wanted to be the one who intervenes, the one who fixes things, so neurosurgery became a clearer path for that. But I had won art awards in school and my interest in merging art and neuroscience topics was always close by. The grids in this series of works takes on the concept of ‘how we become what we are’ in the exploration of emergence of rudimentary aspects of language – symbol, utterance, and the development of meaning and value. They are reduced down to multiple canvases to represent the multiple discreet phases in such development, and that the canvases are brought together into an ‘order’, a specific juxtaposition, shows how the random aspects of our earliest experiences, aural and visual and touch, eventually coalesce by natural plasticity in the nervous system to the ‘order’ we call language. And it is this intrinsic quality that is unique in humans for the most part and is what we are ultimately.”
William Quigley is an American artist born in Philadelphia in 1961. He attended Philadelphia College of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Tyler School in Rome, and Columbia University Graduate School. Since 1985 he has shown in prestigious art fairs, galleries, and museums, internationally with pieces in over 450 private and public collections. Although known for portraiture, his work consists of a wide exploration of abstraction using a variety of materials, subject matter, and text.
“Quigley has been exploring both abstraction and figurative painting using words as a form of conceptual art since 1985. Surface has always been an interest in his paintings whether it be a figure or abstract. The foundation and history of the painting’s surfaces are made by incorporating specific collage elements from studio scraps, torn up sketches, writings, and fabrics. Like a novel, each element in a painting is like a page telling the story, the surface being the whole. The works are created with a force reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist action paintings of the 1940s and ’50s,” said Jason Rulnick, ArtNet.