Paul Gruhler opened his first studio in 1962 at the age of 21 - a
year later he had a solo show at the DeMena Gallery in lower
Manhattan. From the beginning, Gruhler, a self-taught artist, was
compelled by what came to be known as geometric abstraction, in
which the deliberative arrangement of color, line, texture, and
scale, in paintings and collage, evoke from these disparate
elements a sense of meditative harmony. For sixty years, he has
continued to explore the subtle differences that can be made from
color and line. Gruhler was fortunate in the early years to have
met and become good friends with three older artists who were also
important teachers and mentors - first Michael Lekakis, then Harold
Weston and Herb Aach. Lekakis, a celebrated sculptor, who already
had had exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Americans
1963, took Gruhler under his wing, navigating him through New
York's thriving avant-garde art scene. As Carolyn Bauer writes,
"Michael Lekakis was instrumental in encouraging Gruhler to attend
art events, while taking him to invite-only museum openings." He
also introduced him to renowned artists - among them, Alexander
Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, and Barnett Newman - whose
works influenced the young Gruhler, as did such artists as Mark
Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt. Lekakis was also
instrumental in Gruhler's first show, giving titles to his
paintings and writing catalog copy that drew upon his own abstract
poetics. "These canvases," he wrote, are "multi colored fire
densely cascades to suspension hanging a counterpoint of rhythmic
patterns in space covering it like a shroud united by a golden
fragmentation." Over these years Gruhler has had numerous solo and
group shows in the U.S. in New York and Vermont, in Mexico, and
abroad in Finland, Germany, Sweden, and The Netherlands. HARMONICS
is both a retrospective and a current view of Paul Gruhler's
intensive art. "My work," he says, "has been a meditative
exploration of vertical and horizontal relationships in space, in
order to achieve both harmony and tension within color, line and
form." -- Paul Gruhler * Publisher *
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