Born in Louisville Kentucky 1975
education
2006 — MAT University of Louisville, Concentration: Art Education
1998 — BFA Washington University in St. Louis, Concentration: Illustration
Solo Exhibitions
2013 - Green Building Gallery, Louisville Kentucky
2012 - Kentucky School of Art, Louisville Kentucky
2010 - Green Building Gallery, Louisville Kentucky
2008 - Actors Theatre, Louisville Kentucky
2007 - Gallery Nulu, Louisville Kentucky
Group Exhibitions
2012 - Spalding University, "With Child", Louisville Kentucky
2011 - Forest Giant, Louisville Kentucky
2011 - Zephyr Gallery, "LoCAL. Design", Louisville Kentucky
2011 - Indiana University Southeast, “Strange Attractors”, New Albany Indiana
2008 - Ground Floor Gallery, "Nine", Louisville Kentucky
2008 - Morehead University, “The Bluegrass Biennial”, Morehead Kentucky
2007 - Ground Floor Gallery, “Dig”, Louisville Kentucky
2007 - Jennica's, Louisville Kentucky
2006 - Kaviar Forge Gallery, “Artists In Our Midst”, Louisville Kentucky
2005 - Actors Theater Gallery, Louisville Kentucky
2005 - Swanson Reed Gallery, Louisville Kentucky
2004 - Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art, Brooklyn New York
2003 - Ohio Art League, “Spring Juried Exhibition”, Columbus Ohio
2003 - Bliss, Columbus Ohio
2002 - Blue Cube Gallery, Columbus Ohio
2001 - B.L.D. Studio, Columbus Ohio
1999 - 953 Clay Street, Louisville Kentucky
Lectures
2009 Louisville Visual Art Association, “Food For Thought” Guest Lecture Series
Representation
The Green Building Gallery
Collections
The work of Gibbs Rounsavall can be found in public, private, and corporate collections.
Press/Publications
2011 Three Sixty-Five self portrait book. A self portrait was drawn and painted every day for one year. Available at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2010225
2011 Pure Uncut Candy April calender featured artist
2010 LEO weekly magazine feature article
"The inspiration for Gibbs Rounsavall’s “Unearth the Divine” exhibit at the Green Building Gallery lies 600 feet underground and thousands of miles away from the two buildings in downtown Louisville where his work, inspired by the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border, is displayed.
The exhibit is set up like the Julia Child kitchen at the Smithsonian; it’s a public reproduction of a private creation space. The wall-sized painting on the facing wall, the only one in the space, is an explosion of crisp, pure color. The worktable beside the canvas is crowded with paints and brushes, and there is a heaping pile of discarded painters tape on the floor. At first glance, you get the impression the artist may have stepped outside the studio for a moment. Confused as to why the radio was on when I entered the space, I called out the artist’s name in the empty room. One happens upon this busy space where all the elements needed for creation are collected in the same way the Collider endeavors to gather the forces from which our universe emerged.
The newer works are displayed next door to the Green Building, in the rough, gutted belly of 720 W. Market St. The space initially appears to be just another innocuous, undeveloped downtown façade, but its interior holds the vast majority of Rounsavall’s new works. Where the Green Building Gallery is bright and cozy, the 720 display space is just the opposite — cold, cavernous and dilapidated. The contrast serves to heighten the distinction between Rounsavall’s older, more exuberant works and his new dour studies in black and white.
His typical canvases are quite large, one triptych reaching 9 feet by 12 feet, (the size of my boarding school dorm room). Yet the new paintings seem reasonably proportioned in this humungous room, where they float against the gray, shagging walls. The paintings, which are black-and-white enamel paint on board, are a stark contrast to his previous works, which up until this most recent series have been graphic, abstract, optical art paintings — colorful, confident Appolonian studies in visual harmonics. The majority of the paintings in “Unearth the Divine” are a departure from their predecessors. Emerging from the slick black surfaces are various degrees of exposure of the surface beneath the paint, like the white capping of waves. Rounsavall’s white struggles to emerge; organic shapes shimmer in various depths like a school of shooting stars in a tank of deep, dark water.
It would be tempting to deduce that Rounsavall has committed some kind of easy, formulaic inversion of his previous work; where there was light, now will be darkness. Where previously there was strict geometry, now will be organic asymmetry. But beyond that perfunctory survey of obvious contrasts, what is exciting about this new work is the supposition that yielded it. Much like the Large Hadron Collider, Rounsavall is playing catalyst, primordial creator. Standing before an enormous dark triptych, like the surface of an inert earth, he manifests light through inspired subtraction. “This was something 180 degrees from the paintings I had been working on for the last year,” he says. “My calculated exploration of the LHC resulted in developing my own capacity for self-awareness in the moment where an impulse to make a specific kind of mark revealed itself.”
In this echo of creation, Rounsavall is exploring what it means to embody the primordial creative force. Just as Mark Tobey developed a super language to universally convey his experiences with the “divine” half a century ago, Rounsavall uses science and scientific discovery as his superscript to dissect the act of creation. He challenges us to trace our steps back and contemplate a universe where the sacred and the secular had yet to be bisected — where a collision of atoms would set into motion our universe and everything in it."
- Chelsea Gifford
2010 LEO Weekly Magazine Staffpicks
"Artists, like all creative people, hope to find their own sense of expression. If they’re lucky, their creativity grows and alters over time so that they have many “voices.” Gibbs Rounsavall is primarily known as a colorist. What you see at his current two-part exhibition is a man pushing the boundaries of that label. The new works are lush, dark and big — so big that they are housed nearby at 720 E. Market St. His more familiar works are displayed in the Green Building Gallery.
“Reflecting back on these past two years, it has become apparent that discovery involves a sense of unfolding in time and requires one to be equally active and passive,” he says. Although still inspired by nature and science, Rounsavall has let himself freely go where he has not gone before."
—Jo Anne Triplett
2009 Louisville Counts: A Children’s Counting & Art Book, Illustration for #6
2008 Pitch Kentucky Arts and Culture magazine Cover
2008 LEO weekly magazine Staffpicks
Come for the paintings but stay for the drawings. Gibbs Rounsavall’s colorful enamel on aluminum stripes of color have made his name. But it’s his graphite on paper drawings that suck you in. You can feel his creative energy as your eyes travel among the mazes of lines.
This is his first solo gallery show, full of “fresh” paintings and drawings done this year. There’s an immediacy to his art, as if stamped with a “view by” date sticker. Drawing is often labeled as a basic, intimate type of art; Rounsavall throws in an intellectual quality to that mix.
- Joanne Triplet
2007 The Courier Journal
A wine bar may not be the first place that you'd expect optically challenging, visually riveting, technically pristine and intellectually stimulating art. But at Jenicca's Cafe & Wine Bar, you'll find Gibbs Rounsavall's standout series of brilliant enamel over aluminum graphic drawings. The series that takes a single letter or number and morphs it to the edge of clarity shows how sublime -- and complicated -- simplicity can be. The idea behind the cool, scientific medium is to present the drawings, or the shifting symbols, as living things, "sitting on the surface like an organism on a slide," according to the artist. "Gibbs Rounsavall: New Works" continues through Jan. 31 at Jenicca's, 636 E. Market St.
-Diane Heilenman
2005 The Courier Journal
