Greg Colson Turns the Ordinary into Art That Makes You Rethink Everything
- Carro Test
- Apr 21
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
Some artists describe the world, others interpret it. Greg Colson dissects it. His entire enterprise is made up of works of art that have been assembled from the shelves of a hardware store, a sporting goods store, or the stuff sitting around in the garage.
Introduced to his work some 25 years ago through a dealer in Los Angeles, I was immediately struck by the work’s inventiveness and the way the artist transformed the ordinary into something special that explored our modern world of systems, charts, and analysis. Greg Colson’s conceptual art is rooted in the long history of this movement in Southern California, introduced by such artists as Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, and the late Joe Goode. For them, the idea sparks the imagination, and the end result is an answer to the question: what is art? The answer for them went beyond painting and sculpture. It could be a photograph, a video, a performance, or a combination of methods and approaches.
In Colson’s case, his body of work is divided into specific categories, some paintings and some sculptures, but the overall theme is one of exploration—who we are, how we are, and where we are.
For example, the Pie Charts, as he calls them, are tondo paintings created in vibrant colors using simple graphics and common advertising lettering. Each painting explores and defines us by means of surveys. Each presents our condition as a series of statistics—the 21st-century world citizens. The condition of our humanity measured out, our everyday spelled out visually. He sees us as shoppers and travelers, looking at society from our economics to our personal health care and our psychological fears. It is like reading Shakespeare with a calculator, enumerating our behaviors, values, and actions into percentages, calculated numbers, and statistics.
A recent solo show in 2023 at New York’s National Arts Club, Snap Shot: Pie Chart Paintings, prompted the critic John Yau to write:
Rendered in a straightforward, documentary style, complete with graphic signs and changing typefaces, Colson’s pie charts can be funny, perverse, and unsettling, all while inducing alternating waves of laughter and despair. Looking at Leading British Phobias (2011), viewers learn that a large percentage of the British populace has a phobia of “spiders,” “clowns,” and “needles.” Among the other fears cited, Colson lists “dentistry, driving, and heights.” Taken together, these sound like the key ingredients to an Alfred Hitchcock film.
The didactic character of his work is very apparent. There is something to be learned from each painting or sculpture—explanations and advice, knowledge, information, and observation. A constant and clever balance between images and words captures the viewer’s attention and keeps them thinking. “I paint these precise systems on rickety supports that, to me, suggest the precariousness of things,” said Colson.
His Heliocentric Maps, as he titles them, are translations of the complexity of the universe into a three-dimensional collage worthy of comparison to a Picasso Cubist construction. Again, using found and store-bought elements, he explains the remarkable symmetry of the solar system. Fashioned like a high school science project, they are nevertheless highly sophisticated and resourceful, using different kinds of worn balls—baseballs, golf balls, soccer balls—to represent both the Sun and the adjacent planets. The surrounding universe in which all of this exists is depicted on a flat, circular painted plywood panel. Over the course of his career, he has made numerous variations of this theme, mostly in black and white, and others with a wide range of coloured balls. Though Colson refers to them as “maps,” they are in many ways icons of our solar system, a three-dimensional object left to us to ponder.
Another way to see the world through Colson’s eyes is in one of his three-dimensional street maps. Again, using very simple materials—wood scraps, rulers, even chopsticks and paint—these angular constructions are flat abstractions in colour. Each individual element has the name of a street, avenue, or boulevard written across the surface. A puzzle of sticks and short boards lays out the roadway patterns and intersections familiar to every car driver in the world. Colson’s map may focus on a neighbourhood, an individual city, or a borough, like the map of Brooklyn. A dimensional property like a Duchamp readymade, we see the ordinary transformed. The abstract nature of these sculptures underscores the networks we live by.
Another version of this series is his Intersections, tuned into complex, high-relief structures of multiple roadways and streets. This multi-dimensional sculpture underscores how our paths in life metaphorically intermix. One road leads to the next, and so on.
Objects fill the studio: an inflatable rubber tire hangs on the wall. It is a guide of sorts, identifying ways to achieve bliss. Called Circle of Bliss, it features painted white letters and forms on the soft black surface. Instead of what you might find on a blackboard in a classroom or yoga studio, its home is the very portable rubber tire. We can, ironically, carry our bliss anywhere. About it, Colson adds, “In a way, the Circle of Bliss self-help diagram is a ‘front’, a facade… that presumes we’ve got our act together. Maybe we do to some degree, but the air could leak out of that inner tube.”
The most recent of works, Engraved Cities, is another kind of invented map. Here, the geography of a city is defined by small holes pierced into plywood so that the map becomes a pattern. It is the square miles of the city and the physical boundary of the city represented as an abstract shape drilled into the painted wood surface. Irregular and awkward—is it a comment on abstract painting? Its shape and form could be a painting. Is it a diagrammatic representation of an area of land, or the very newest digital representation of a place? The viewers finally decide for themselves. Colson, as usual, simply poses the question. The answer for him is, this is art.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
