Steve Galloway

STEVE GALLOWAY (b. 1952 in Los Angeles, CA) graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974. Galloway was the recipient of a prestigious grant from National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 as well as the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2017. He has original works in the permanent collections of the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; the Franklin Mint, Philadelphia; the National Collection of France (FRAC); and The Fondation Colas, France. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

Set somewhere on the outskirts of our recognizable galaxy, the universe of painter Steve Galloway is scattered over numberless chunks of swampland where grotesque events transpire in bizarre, bucolic tropics that William Henry Hudson might have imagined in a paranoid, malarial dream.

Though it may resemble our own world, Galloway’s is really a parallel universe, beholden only to laws of its own.  Familiar images – corks, pulleys, anthills, and tikis – lure us into thinking we are on home ground, but the similarity ends abruptly when the artist subjects these objects to incongruous juxtapositions that defy normal rules of physics.  An image-maker par excellence, Galloway constructs dramatic pictorial situations that couldn’t possibly exist outside a poet’s imagination.