Viridian Artists Inc. is pleased to present an exhibition of digital imagery by the artist/scientist/photographer Wally Gilbert, entitled “Towers”.

Wally Gilbert has always been modest about his achievements. If you looked him up on Wikipedia, you would learn that he is not only a Nobel Prize-winning scientist but also a Cambridge graduate, a Harvard professor, and a noted and honored expert in numerous other scientific investigations. But after retiring from Harvard in 2001, he turned to the artistic side of his brain and began a career in digital photography, transforming his images with Photoshop and undoubtedly other self-invented techniques to make fascinating compositions suggestive of depths beyond reality. Gilbert has been working with digital photography now for over a decade, sometimes exploring color, sometimes focusing on black & white imagery. In this exhibit, his focus is on color and light which he investigates and manipulates, transforming fragments of photographs into a plethora of artistic and arresting abstract and sometimes nearly realistic artworks.

The artist/scientist continues his exploration of the digital media of photography, approaching it with scientific gusto, artistic freedom and the wisdom of experimentation, pushing and transforming his images by taking color to the extreme. The work in his latest exhibition begins with color, light and overlapping shapes, creating complex abstractions that leave the viewer to imagine their origins. This time, many of the images begin with towering architectonic structures, perhaps reminding us - with the title “Torn Building Towers”- of The Twin Towers of 9/11.

Gilbert explores the medium of photography zealously, searching for beauty and then translating that beauty into his own imagistic language of color and form. He first captures photographically a wide variety of subjects, translating the subjects into artistic images that he enhances digitally, pushing colors and shapes creatively and scientifically perhaps, reminding us that the thinking processes of artists and scientists are more alike than we previously realized.

With this new series of images, Gilbert continues exploring architectural imagery, but now repeating & altering it so that the images dance before your eyes. They glow with color driven to full saturation creating new interactions, until they have become “abstract meditations” at times approaching the psychedelic images of the 70’s. A time so different from now but perhaps not so for the show at the Whitney of 70’s Political Art which featured the works of many old friends.

In his digitally altered photographs, Wally Gilbert slices up and weaves city scenes, cranking color values off the charts. Ember red burns against royal purple, and lemon-yellow pops against red and violet, in "Torn Building Tower – Triptych." Zing! The three narrow vertical panels echo forms of the buildings they depict, which tumble, fold, and open into dazzling, game-board grids.

(Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, March 31, 2017)

His art was featured in the Saatchi Fair in London in September in this year as well as numerous venues on the East & West Coast of the US. We hope that you will be able to meet this outstanding artist and share his vision through seeing these incredibly fascinating artworks.