He paints exhaustion, desire, and the ghosts of modern life—Aaron Gilbert on how to stay human in a fractured world

Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work bridges the mythic and the domestic, capturing moments of intimacy under the weight of spiritual, political, and economic pressure. He’s exhibited internationally and is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery. His paintings are both tender and prophetic, filled with symbolic ruptures, spectral presences, and radiant color.

He explains:

* Growing up in a creative family and abandoning a career in engineering to pursue painting—while becoming a father.

* Why he doesn’t chase “great art,” but instead builds images that hold his full self—flawed, contradictory, and reaching.

* Painting not to reflect the moment, but to prophesize what lies beyond our broken stories.

* The struggle to maintain mystery, emotional precision, and resistance within large-scale work.

* How brand logos become talismans, color becomes spirit, and art becomes a tear in the fabric of what we think is real.

00:00 Welcome to NewCrits01:06 “People still seem to fuck—and that’s a good thing.”02:24 What does it mean to paint history now?04:07 “I wanted to make the worst WPA paintings ever.”05:01 Intimacy vs. Monumentality10:14 Painting the workplace: a shape-shifting host12:34 From engineering to painting14:20 Becoming a father and an artist, simultaneously15:53 “These might be the only paintings I ever make.”17:01 Art as a lifeline for the socially awkward20:00 Too private to paint?24:01 The artist as prophet30:39 What’s missing in art school? Elders.37:08 SpongeBob as an exhausted adult42:45 The levity of “Hot Moms”47:00 Floating balaclavas and unsolved images50:00 Spectral figures and ghostly presences52:00 Medieval symbology and the power of icons52:53 Giotto and the doorway between worldviews54:06 Enchantment vs. extraction in Western philosophy55:03 Mark Fisher, hauntology, and lost futures56:16 Logos as spiritual metaphors—enter Adidas57:10 The metaphysics of branding and seduction59:50 White holes, time loops, and painting as rupture01:03:15 Against the heroic posture in painting01:04:24 Imperfection as access to potential01:09:00 Influence, indebtedness, and divergence01:13:00 Time as a mystery—Carlo Rovelli and quantum thought01:14:10 Consciousness, rupture, and looped time01:15:03 Final thoughts and an invitation to see the work in person01:16:00 Thank you, Aaron Gilbert

Follow Aaron:Web: https://www.aaron-studio.com/Instagram: @aaron_gilbert_studio

Follow Gladstone Gallery:Learn more about Aaron Gilbert’s exhibition, World Without End, at Gladstone Gallery here.Web: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/Instagram: @gladstone.gallery

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Full Transcript

Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody, I want to thank you all for coming. This is the 19th NewCrits Talk. NewCrits is a global platform for studio mentorship, we have 16 artists on our platform that you can meet with directly, and we offer studio mentorship, professional mentorship, portfolio reviews and contract coaching. It really is a platform to democratize our education.

The one thing that we do in person are these talks. But we're also starting to offer classes. Our first class starts tomorrow, which is called New Identities for Dangerous Times. We'll be offering three more courses in the fall with some more artists that will all be announced soon. Okay, that's it for NewCrits.

We are worn out psychologically, physically, financially, ecologically, spiritually. We've suffered injuries and lost loved ones, limbs and homes. We've struck out and played on lost love and conjured hope. Ours is an age of exhaustion, and Aaron Gilbert paints the exhausted of the earth. The figures in Aaron's paintings are weary, beyond weary, but nevertheless, we see them on dates playing with their children, buying one another with desire and holding one another with heat for all the exhaustion.

People still seem to fuck. And that's a good thing because in a way that erotic charge is hope. A hope for a new tomorrow, for new life, and for survival. Now with all that I saw in Aaron's work, it would still be enough. But what compels me to stay longer is a strange sort of enchanting that many of the paintings hold.

They're pictures that hold their own ruptures in very subtle and sometimes secretive ways. They're paintings of modern life with wormholes to other moments, other feelings, and other spirits. We're not just in the present. We are with the ghosts of many moments and I can't help but think that they're there to help us find redemption. And in the moment we find ourselves in, I welcome all the redemption I can. Please welcome Aaron Gilbert.

Aaron Gilbert: Thank you. That was really beautiful, actually.

Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling?

Aaron Gilbert: I'm good. It's nice to see everyone here.

Ajay Kurian: You got your tequila.

Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, and a room full of people that I'm really happy to have a conversation with. So this is great.

Ajay Kurian: Aaron has a show up at Gladstone Gallery right now. It's up until April 19th and I thought we should just start there. The first thing that crosses my mind, especially looking at older work and now looking at the new show, is that a lot of these paintings feel like history paintings in their own way. How does that sit with you? What do you think about the space of history painting?

Aaron Gilbert: That's really something I was trying to contend with in a very different way. Probably about six years ago, seeing Diego Rivera's murals at the National Palace in Mexico City for the first time. I was really knocked over by the scope and the scale of that project. It felt like a lifelong undertaking. In a way, it felt like a visual form of Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, and it just made me think that there was a much further reach I could do.

There was a much bigger set of questions that I could go for more directly. I think this show was a beginning to me trying to ask and respond to those questions. In a way, I wanted to make like the worst WPA paintings ever made. Not that they're bad paintings, but that they kind of hit at how I feel viscerally about the world that we're living through in relation to what it should be.

Ajay Kurian: When you say the worst WPA paintings, I'm trying to see what energy that conjures in the work, because to me, you tow the line between finding something that feels structural but also extremely intimate. And when I think about murals, intimacy is not the first thing that comes to mind.

Aaron Gilbert: That's where I take issue with a lot of history painting, or where I have maybe a different way of approaching it. I think mine's kind of an inverse, you know? So if you think of a classic history painting; it's like a top down telling of history. Here are archetypes of the workers and here is this historical figure. But for me, what I'm engaged with is this idea of how can I, as someone knowing all these contradictory and all these facets of myself and my life that are pulling in different directions and that are compromised in different ways.

How can I still in some way find a way to be transformative in this world? How do we start with the lives that we actually inhabit and figure out how to move outwards and address these larger societal, historical forces? So it's kind of a reverse process, but with the same set of concerns.

Ajay Kurian: In this painting here, there's so many things going on and so many places to start, but in terms of thinking about particularity first, do you find that structure helps you to then start orienting these stories? Or how does a painting of this vast kind of start coming together in the questions that you're trying to tackle?

Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, so this is a painting I didn't know how to do before I did it, and I just kind of knew that was going to be the case. The way I approach it is I start making drawings and there's a full size work on paper that's the same scale as this drawing. Initially, the painting started with this very small sketch of the mother, and the daughters staying on the tub, braiding her hair. And I liked that gesture. Then I was thinking the mother would be looking out the window and I didn't know where yet, but maybe there's a courtyard. So initially she was ground level. And then because I'm working on paper, I started to think it was a lot more interesting in terms of the power dynamic of her gaze, for her to be higher up and looking down at someone or something outside. Because it was a work on paper, I was able to cut it and move it up.

This was gradually built piece by piece. And the only way I knew to approach it was to start with these small and intimate vignettes, begin to tie them together and think about how to build a full constellation within a piece.

Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. As soon as I see that scene or focus in on it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's an Aaron Gilbert painting right there. But then to see that become a story that unfolds into other stories and then has a larger constellation within it, is something that structurally makes sense to me. In the early work that I had seen of yours, there's an intimacy that's based in a single room.

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