ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Paintings and Drawings

Press Release

Titled Et in Arcadia Ego, the selection of work is drawn from disparate periods of the artist’s professional life.  A unifying theme is the landscape and the search for psychic repose: the arcadia.  Places of ultimate significance to the artist as a young man—locales such as Maine and New York—are explored in multiple works.  In his later pictures, he paints from the viewpoint of mortality itself.

Born in Kansas City, MO, Marvin Gates began his artistic education with his mother,  an early contemporary art dealer in that city. His childhood, adolescence and young adulthood was subsumed in the world of discovering, buying and selling paintings.  He received his MFA from Boston University, studying with John Walker.  He was a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.  His work is in the permanent collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS.

Chandra Speeth, in an essay “Et in Manhattan ego”  about Gates’ painting Forward, writes:  “Whatever Death strides through sets itself apart from him, if only for the instant he touches it.  This instant is the one Gates has chosen to paint…”