Publications
Max Gimblett (2020)
Lewis Hyde, Max Gimblett
MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde and painter Max Gimblett collaborate to create a modern American version of the twelfth-century Chinese “Oxherding Series.” As Lewis Hyde writes, “There are ten drawings, the first of which shows a young herder who has lost the ox he is supposed to be tending. In subsequent images he finds the ox’s tracks, sees the beast itself, tames it, and rides it home. In the seventh drawing the ox disappears… it was a metaphor for something, not to be mistaken for the thing itself.” In dialogue with Gimblett’s paintings and the Chinese text, Hyde’s revolutionary approach provides three different English-language versions to the same poem: a one-word response, a second version that adds just enough for complete sentences, and the third adds poetic embellishment. Combining Chinese text, visual art, and multiple English translations, The Disappearing Ox is a fluid, multilayered reading experience.
Max Gimblett is a painter, calligrapher, and Rinzai Zen monk. His work, a harmonious postwar synthesis of American and Japanese art, brings together abstract expressionism, modernism, spiritual abstraction, and Asian calligraphy. Gimblett’s work was included in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia,1869-1989 at the Guggenheim Museum. Gimblett is represented in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki. Gimblett leads Sumi ink workshops in many countries. Gimblett was awarded the Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM). He lives and works in New York and regularly visits New Zealand.
Max Gimblett (2016)
Interview with Max Gimblett by James Blackie
Max Gimblett (2016)
Published by Gow Lansford Gallery
Published on the occasion of Max's 80th birthday celebration and One Day in the Afternoon of the Gods at Gow Langsford Gallery, From Grafton to the Guggenheim—Max Gimblett (2016) takes a look at Max's life and career with lush images of paintings and a collection of personal photographs from his childhood in New Zealand through his travels, landing at his studio on the Bowery since 1977.
Max Gimblett (2015)
Essay by Tom Huhn
Forward by Eric Shiner
This is the first publication to focus entirely on the sumi ink paintings of American-New Zealand artist Max Gimblett (born 1935). Known for his work with the quatrefoil shape, Gimlett paints on canvas, wood panel and exquisite papers. With a detailed philosophical essay by Tom Huhn (Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant) and a forward by Eric Shiner, Director of the Warhol Museum, Pittsburg (Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei). Published by Charta, Milan.
Max Gimblett (2013)
Interview by Alexandra Munroe,
Forward by Lewis Hyde
This latest monograph on New Zealand-born and New York-based painter Max Gimblett (born 1935) includes paintings and works on paper completed between 2002 and 2012. These recent works continue his focus on the shapes of the quatrefoil, the square and the circle, often covered in gold leaf and showing the influence of Asian art and calligraphy. With a dynamic interview by Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, Alexandra Munroe (The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989) and a clever forward by author/poet Lewis Hyde (Trickster Makes this World, The Gift). Published by Charta, Milan.
Max Gimblett (2010)
Photos by John Savage
Essay by Jenni Quilter
For the last 36 years, New Zealand-born painter and ordained Buddhist monk Max Gimblett (born 1935) has been working out of the same painting studio on New York's Lower East Side. With images by renowned photographer John Savage and an insightful essay by author/scholar Jenni Quilter (New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets), Workspace offers an exciting glimpse into Gimblett's daily practice, and explores the recesses of his studio. Published by Charta, Milan.
Max Gimblett (2002)
Essays by Wystan Curnow and John Yau
This is the first major monograph on Max Gimblett and provides an overview of his extraordinary varied art practice as well as a glimpse at the man himself. A New Zealander who has made New York his home for the past thirty years, Gimblett has exhibited extensively since the mid-1970s with his work shown internationally in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Spain and held as a consequence in major collections, both public and private, throughout the world.
Max Gimblett’s work consists largely of object based paintings in a variety of shapes – the oval, rectangle, circle, square, and most well know, the quatrefoil. The surfaces combine the use of acrylic paints and resins with precious metals such as gold, silver, moon gold and copper as he explores the multiplicity of meanings attached to such revered materials and forms. The paintings embrace both Eastern and Western philosophies in associating precious metals with honor, wisdom, light and enlightenment and together with the drawings, which are a distinctive and parallel achievement, reference ancient symbols and belief systems and enact the transformation of material and spiritual energies.
The essays by eminent art writers Wystan Curnow and John Yau allow for insights and reflection on the various aspects of Gimblett’s practice. From the ‘Geos’ of the 1970s, through a myriad of shapes and techniques to current work that is just as stylistically diverse, this book maps the development of an exceptional career. Published by Craig Potton Publishing and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland.