All Photos and Story By Gail
Earlier this year, on a Saturday when New York was hit with a surprise heavy snowfall, I was making my way through the Chelsea galleries. Stopping in to 303 Gallery, I discovered A Sky Free From Bombs Is A Beautiful Sky, an exhibition by artist Rob Pruitt. There was something especially appropriate about encountering Pruitt’s work on a day when the sky and the light outside were constantly changing . . .
Just inside the gallery, I noticed a curious bit of information on the wall: the title of the exhibition would change every day during its run. While I didn’t get around to writing about the show before it closed, the work — and the story behind it — were simply too beautiful not to share. In retrospect, here are a selection of my photos and a look at an exhibition fascinated by one thing we can never hold onto: time.
A Sky Free From Bombs was Pruitt’s third solo exhibition at 303 Gallery and brought together paintings, wall sculptures and works on paper that explore the artist’s ongoing fascination with the gradient — the gradual transition from one color or tone to another. In Pruitt’s hands, these aren’t simply exercises in color: the gradients become a way of visualizing time, light, memory and change.
Some of the most striking works in the exhibition were Pruitt’s 24 Hour Paintings, composed of 24 individual canvases, with each panel representing one hour of the day. The paintings are based on photographs Pruitt takes of the sky with his iPhone, translating those fleeting observations of sunrise, daylight, dusk and darkness into meticulously mixed and spray-painted fields of color. Seen together, the panels essentially create an entire day in paint.
The artist takes an even more literal approach to time in a series incorporating functioning clocks. A group of 12 clocks runs in sync, with each clock representing a different two-hour segment of the day. The clock face and its frame are painted to correspond with that particular moment, progressing from the darkness of midnight through the changing colors of daylight. When the actual time arrives, the hands of the clock disappear into the painted field, creating a wonderfully strange moment when real time and painted time briefly become one.
Another series takes the form of the familiar Stendig calendar, the minimalist wall calendar designed by Massimo Vignelli. Rather than filling its boxes with appointments, birthdays and reminders, Pruitt uses each day as a space to record a watercolor of that morning’s sunrise. The calendar becomes less about keeping track of what we have to do and more about acknowledging that another day has arrived — and is already passing.
The exhibition also included Pruitt’s earlier Suicide Paintings, in which gradients appear within gradient frames, creating the illusion of windows, doors or passages leading into an expansive psychological space. Despite their monumental scale, the works have a surprisingly meditative quality, inviting the viewer to simply spend time looking.
Then there was the exhibition title itself — or, more accurately, the ever-changing exhibition title. Pruitt began the show as Skyscapes and then improvised a new title every day. It’s a clever extension of the ideas running through the work. If the paintings are about the constantly changing nature of light and time, why should the name of the exhibition remain fixed?
That may be what I found most appealing about Pruitt’s work. Nothing here attempts to stop time; instead, the work acknowledges how quickly everything changes. A sunrise becomes a painting. An hour becomes a color. A calendar becomes a record of light. Even the name of the exhibition exists only temporarily. Perhaps that is why seeing these works on a snowy day felt particularly memorable. The sky outside the gallery was changing by the minute, just as it always does. Rob Pruitt simply found a beautiful way to make us pay attention to it.
