Gary Faigin, “Worlds Seen and Unseen”

by Matthew Kangas

Harris/Harvey Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Continuing through February 28, 2026

Gary Faigin, “Outpost,” 2025, oil on panel, 22 x 28”. All images courtesy of Harris/Harvey Gallery, Seattle.

The Gary Faigin memorial retrospective is not a museum survey, but a highly selective scan of earlier works and his final series, “Colony.” It gives his considerable audience a chance to consider his evolution as a painter and ponder the cumulative effect of his peculiar vision. Faigin, who died last year at the age of 75, was a polymath who combined his extensive studio activities with co-founding an art school, conducting art tours in Europe, and freelancing as an art critic for newspaper and radio. He was an indefatigable worker, perhaps overcompensating for his lack of an academic degree in art, substituting a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, another year in New York at Parsons and the National Academy, and most formatively, two years under the legendary Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League. The Gage Academy of Art, which he formed with his widow, Pam Belyea, is located in the heart of Seattle’s tech corridor, South Lake Union, modeled on the League in New York, has been a big success.

It’s hard to detect any one art historical movement from which the artist’s vision emerges. Rather, it alludes to a multiplicity of influences that include Surrealism, Magic Realism, fantasy art, and science-fiction illustration. Faigin worked in depth on each series for the 20 solo exhibits during his lifetime, seen from Seattle to Santa Fe to New York and Coos Bay, Oregon. Consistent and cohesive, each series explored Faigin’s struggle to combine such varied sources into an individual style. Sometimes he succeeded, other times the struggle overwhelmed the result.

Gary Faigin, “Evolution,” 1994, oil on panel, 36 x 48”.

For example, the earliest work on view, “Evolution” (1994) is a bit of an in-joke, with a fruit still life of apples, pears and bananas at its center but accompanied in the upper-left corner by a monochrome depiction of a sphere, a cone and a pyramid. The juxtaposition summons up Paul Cézanne’s classic description of all art as “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in perspective.”

Faigin was nothing if not erudite. His teaching was memorable, remembered and hailed in many posthumous eulogies. Besides “Evolution,” “Cliff Dwellers” (1998) suggests future directions which took Faigin years to realize. Tiny improbable houses are perched atop enormous geological pillars he might have visited in Utah. It demonstrates the grandeur the artist aimed for, too often reduced in size for images of comparable ambition.

Gary Faigin, “HOT,” 2000, oil on panel, 44 x 72”.

Perhaps pointing tragically to a future series that did not occur, “HOT” (2000) foretells the terrors of climate change and the necessity of urban energy economies. The skyline resembles New York but with a fiercely burning rectangle in the middle, the word “HOT” at its center blazing like a giant movie screen. The largest work on view at 44 by 72 inches, it could be Faigin’s masterpiece: prophetic and visionary indeed.

Averaging 30 by 40 inches, the steam locomotive images better capture the relationship between subject and size. “Emergency Exit” (2023) has a train implausibly crossing an icy link between a pair of icebergs. Similarly, “Counterbalance” (2005) juxtaposes a still life of vases, fruits and vegetables with a blue-green mountainous landscape. It is more convincing than other attempts to place oversized still lifes against ragged urban settings (“Station Stop,” 2013) or another set above a gushing waterfall titled “Fall Group Picture” (2009).

Gary Faigin, “Station Stop,” 2013, oil on panel, 30 x 40”.

Although the final series is more diminutive than “Cliff Dwellers,” it better coheres into compelling vistas that draw us in, if only in taunting disbelief. The pictures also reinforce the artist’s bitter sense of humor as he was dying. Tiny midcentury modern houses are placed in otherwise uninhabited planetary settings, with neighboring planets or moons set in darkened night skies. They focus tightly on the subjects at hand right up to and including suburban lawns, water towers, and, as in “Outpost” (2025), a spaceship ready for return to Earth as though it is a commute. “Forever Home” (2025) shoves a bungalow beneath gigantic stalactite-like rock formations, a companion to “Nocturnal” (2025) with its house trapped in an ominous valley. Each title reinforces the absurdity of space colonization fantasies, Elon Musk’s declarations notwithstanding. They conclude a lifetime of formal explorations on a high note, combining an impeccable execution with a subject that rises to the level of the artist’s skills.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.