Series

You have never heard of Marvin Gates. But then, few people have. He is that art world myth: a painter who develops in hiding and emerges late, fully formed. I first met him in my studio in Boston, where he told me, after observing that I was the kind of person he would enjoy talking to at a cocktail party, that when it came to painting I should just “tack my balls to the wall and face ridicule.” His shirt was buttoned to the top button.

In graduate school, Gates was known for engineering pulley systems to make paintings too big for the gallery space (they scrolled down onto the floor), and basically not acting like any kind of student. Upon receiving his MFA, he said he had “some questions.” He spent the next decade asking them, and they resulted in a group of pictures now on display at the Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City.

The four pictures that constitute the centerpiece of the show are identical in size and tell a single story, so Gates considers them one piece. He spent a year on each, and told me that one of his questions is why he would do such a particular thing over such a long period of time. When you see the paintings (we’ll bring you one each day this week; click here for The Blue Bag, Head of the Driver, and Forwards), it becomes pretty clear. They are keen, fierce, and strange—and clearly a labor of love.