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Gaylen Hansen: Three Decades of Paintings

Presented by Salt Lake Art Center at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

February 15-May 31, 2008

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The exhibition features over 40 works by Gaylen Hansen, a painter whose signature style of the rural West encompasses a world of distorted comical settings with gigantic animals and insects, and of course, his alter ego the Kernal. Gaylen Hansen is a whimsical storyteller, using paint as his medium to evoke surreal settings inhabited by fantastical fauna and flora. Born in 1921 in Garland, Utah and raised on a farm, Hansen has chosen to live in the country most of his life. Hansen attracted the art world's attention during the neo-Expressionist boom of the 1970s when, in his own words, he 'quit trying to keep one step behind the latest art movement' and decided to focus on what he saw in his ten-acre backyard in Palouse, WA. Inspired by a childhood on the farm and his years surrounded by the rural Washington landscape - with open spaces, rolling wheat fields, lush river valleys - Hansen creates large-scale paintings with bears, crickets, dogs, ducks, fish, magpies, and a recurrent character (and alter ego), Kernal Bentleg. The Kernal is a rough and rugged frontiersman. Hansen's frontier is one of a powerful and untamed nature, interacting with the Kernal and intruding upon civilization in unexpected ways, with comical results. In a The Seattle Post-Intelligencer review, Regina Hackett writes Hansen 'paints the human comedy as if it's coming to a close.' The distortion of scale is a significant aspect - a grasshopper larger than a car; a dog riding on a fish's back; a buffalo stands on its head. As Hansen has said, 'Much in this world is upside down. When you turn things upside down you also know what is right side up.' Additionally, Hansen works his compositions with intuition not unlike jazz improvisation so that 'the ground shapes the figures and the figures shape the ground.'