R. Gregory Cole emerged as a painter forged in one of the most electrically charged artistic environments of the twentieth century. Born in North Carolina in 1964, Cole came of age as an artist during his years living in New York's East Village in the 1980s, a neighborhood then pulsating with raw creative ambition. His most formative institutional experience was studying painting at the Art Students League of New York under Richard Pousette-Dart, who began teaching at the Art Students League in 1980 and continued there until his death. Pousette-Dart was a founder of the New York School, who turned away from realism to create abstract, spontaneous-seeming compositions that incorporated Freudian and Jungian symbolism and elements of European modernism. To have studied under such a titan of Abstract Expressionism is to have drunk directly from the wellspring of American modernism, and the influence reverberates profoundly throughout Cole's oeuvre.

The paintings visible here reveal an artist who absorbed Pousette-Dart's lessons not as formula but as liberation. In the color grid works — those vibrant arrangements of bold rectangular fields — one sees Cole thinking carefully about the emotional resonance of pure color relationships, in a tradition that connects Albers to Mondrian and beyond. The grids are not cold or clinical; they pulse with personality, each pairing of hot pink against cobalt or teal against orange suggesting mood, argument, and resolution. Cole's color instincts are clearly those of a painter who has thought deeply about how hue communicates before a single representational mark is made. The mock-up showing these works hung in interior spaces confirms their vitality as objects that hold their own against architectural scale and warm wood tones.

Perhaps most compelling are Cole's looser, more gestural works. The expressionist painting featuring dark olive, deep purple, and slashing yellow marks carries the spirit of the East Village moment — urgent, physical, unapologetic — while also displaying a genuine painterly intelligence in how the marks build and release tension across the surface. Pousette-Dart's students recalled that he encouraged them to look for their own answers rather than imposing solutions, wanting each artist to find their own way. Cole appears to have taken that teaching fully to heart. The figurative-yet-abstract canvas featuring the magenta octopus-like creature surrounded by scattered orbs on a teal ground shows a painter willing to embrace mythology, the subconscious, and surreal imagery with genuine conviction. It recalls the best of Neo-Expressionism while remaining distinctly Cole's own voice. Across all these bodies of work — the grids, the gestural paintings, the chromatic stripe compositions — one encounters an artist of serious formation and joyful independence.

Artnews