Gail Winbury

Biography

Gail Winbury's work has been seen in exhibitions throughout the States, Germany, Mexico, and Italy. She has had multiple solo exhibitions including; 73See Gallery, Montclair, NJ, Farmstead Art Gallery, Basking Ridge, NJ, Frechard Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pa, The Henrich Heine Haus, Germany, and Gallery 350Bleecker, Manhattan, NY among others. Her work was included in The Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ, Ellerslie Museum, Trenton, NJ, The Monmouth Museum of Art, Monmouth, NJ, Carter Burden Gallery, Manhattan, NY, Village West Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, St Peter’s University, Jersey City, NJ, Aferro Gallery, Newark, NJ, The Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ, The College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ, William James College, Newton, Massachusetts, OTA Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM, The Heinrich Heine Haus, Luneburg, Germany, ARCO (The Architectural School) San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and in Matera Italy, among others.  Winbury hopes to curate, March 2021, Reinventing Eve at the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, Newark, NJ.

She has been an artist-in-residence at: the School of Visual Arts, Manhattan, Castle Hill School of the Arts, Truro Mass., had a fellowship with the Bau Foundation in Italy, and received a grant for an artist residency in Arad, Israel from the Jewish Federation. She currently is the artist in residence at The Co-Co in Summit, New Jersey (a women's co-working space).

Winbury is interested in representing the geography of the emotional and psychological world and issues of the human condition. Some of her prior work has explored; gender, mortality, and childhood memory. She most recently worked on the Pandemic Series. She merges her nearly 20 years as an artist seamlessly with her nearly 30 years as a psychologist. Winbury studied for 15 years with artist Dorothy Yung, two years at the School of Visual Arts, Manhattan, and at the Provincetown Museum School. She has a BS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Psy.D. from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. Her work is in private collections; in the United States, Milan and Matera, Italy, Luneburg, Germany, and London, UK. Public collections include the Copelouzos Family Museum, Athens, Greece, and the Atlantic Health Commission, NJ.

Artist statement

It was a bitterly cold and gray day in February 2014. Gail Winbury returned from a brief trip to Woodstock, New York. Walking into her studio, she was shocked by the vibrant colors of her paintings. She was overwhelmed but had no idea why. This colorist painter, stopped using warm bright colors, restricting her pallet to mixed blacks, blues, and ochre. Soon, Winbury realized it was the anniversary of both of her parents' deaths. She was also about to turn sixty. For two years, her paintings reflected a grappling with aging, death, and the ensuing losses that come with time's passage.

Gail Winbury is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her background and training as an artist merge seamlessly with her background as a psychologist. For example, an earlier body of Winbury's work (2011-2016), explored female sexuality from an empathic point of view. As an artist, Winbury struggled with the male gaze in art. For years she thought about and disagreed with de Kooning's depiction of women as aggressive slashes, gorgons, and medusa. Yet she was deeply influenced by his work. Taking back de Kooning's luscious pinks and salmons and strong gestures, Winbury used abstract language to express her ideas about women's sexuality. 

Most of Winbury's art is expressive, emotional, and psychological. Despite an autobiographical reference at times, the work has a universal resonance. Her painting is abstract, however, often there is the slightest hint of the figure. She blends psychological theory and personal experience/memory with abstraction. She invites the viewer to slow down from a plugged-in world, to contemplate, and to find themselves in the work. Winbury communicates profoundly in ways where words are inadequate to express feelings and experiences. The Inscrutables: our intimate selves, a 2017 series, was a visual journal painted over a 9-month period. Started in a creative fallow, each piece held the truth of her particular mood or memory from day to day. Winbury's 2018-2020, series The Otherside grapples with a childhood memory and the nature of memory. Since the Pandemic, Winbury left her large studio. She worked in her small home studio on the paper creating what she calls the Pandemic Series. These oil paintings, reflect the effects of the Pandemic. Returning March 2 from a month in Mexico, the artist slammed into the virus that was raging in New Jersey.   

Winbury has a gift for understanding uncertainty, conflict, and human yearnings. She makes art that reflects the enduring triumphs, joys, sorrows, losses of the human condition.