AARON GILBERT
Gladstone presents an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Brooklynbased artist Aaron Gilbert, marking his first solo presentation in Belgium.
April 22 — June 27, 2026
Gilbert is known for depicting scenes from private everyday life while invoking the weight of institutional forces, setting intimate narratives against the fluorescent glow cast by the iconography of feudal late-stage technocapitalism. Gilbert’s paintings capture the visual framework of his Brooklyn microcosm and the characters that populate it with a hyper-specificity that advances from the social realism of Gustave Courbet, Otto Dix, and George Tooker, focusing on the transformative potential of individuals and love as a transcending power amid a social infrastructure dictated by commodity fetishism. While Gilbert’s own presence is typically palpable within the deeply personal interactions he represents, these new paintings mark a stark shift in perspective. His vantage point recedes before the frame and he becomes an observer encountering something transitory and unknowable in each scene, an outsider looking in. Interior lives and dynamics between figures are impossible to discern. A man clutching a potted plant stands before the open back seat door of a Hyundai as a woman in an evening gown emerges. A pedestrian appears subtly levitating, luminescing under an awning on an otherwise dark and rainy night, as he passes in front of a perforated roll gate partially obscuring and distorting an infinitely deep visual field. The intense, direct gaze of a woman holding a phone to her ear is both immediate and elusive, drawing the viewer into a moment that feels simultaneously confrontational and inaccessible. A man lifts the edge of a doormat in what appears to be an ordinary gesture but is possibly the uncovering of an illusion, or a momentary penetration of the threshold between the labyrinth that contains our social world and a larger external force.
Gilbert’s paintings reverberate with visual harmony observed directly from his immediate surroundings. He returns to the same storefronts— an eyebrow threading salon, a Gopuff, an Adidas store, and an AT&T store with a Bluemercury logo reflected in its window from across the street— with repeated and rigorous attention, harnessing a different phenomenon each time. His eye transcends what is directly present, revealing a magically charged underpinning to each space. Enchanted raindrops, ectoplasmic puddles, unnaturally emitted light, visual echoes, and transparencies suggest a thin veil between our world and supernatural activity beyond our understanding. In a time defined as much by the seismic changes we anticipate as by our lived experience, Gilbert’s work not only encapsulates this ultra-contemporary moment but catches the spectre of our looming future.