Brooklyn-based Gabel works mainly in pencil, on a range of surfaces, from small gesso-board panels to large wall drawings, all of which will be showcased in this exhibition. His drawings typically feature wiry renderings of people around which scrawled lines of text elaborate imaginary narratives. His characters are usually fictional, but are based on types drawn from a contemporary American landscape of office workers, soccer moms, support groups, alcoholic loners, and artists scheming grand projects from monotonous day jobs.

Often caught in fleeting moments, the significance of which is only later grasped, Gabel’s protagonists can seem consumed with regret, caught up in a world of constricted social intercourse and fading dreams. If this is so, they nevertheless achieve something like redemption through the attentions of the artist’s pencil, illuminated and elevated through his empathy and instinct for the human comedy. Gabel’s remarkable psychological intuition recalls Proust in its lucidity, an association also reinforced by his use of snaking, elaborately drawn out sentences.

For this exhibition, Gabel will be producing two large wall drawings created in-situ at the gallery, as well as a series of drawings on wooden panels, and mid-sized works on canvas. A special project relating to his day job as a librarian at a university library in Brooklyn will also be featured, including a suite of new colored pencil drawings documenting his day-to-day distractions doing Google searches of his own name and anxiously checking his rating on Artfacts.net.

Jeff Gabel was born in Portland, Oregon in 1968, and grew up in Nebraska. He received a BFA from Kansas State University in 1992, and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1995. He had a solo museum show at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, as well as solo exhibitions at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in 2007, 2004, and 2001. Gabel’s series of drawings based on his own blog are featured in the gallery’s summer group exhibition ‘This Is Not A Drawing’, and, in October this year, he will be included in ‘Off the Beaten Road’ at the A+D Gallery at Columbia College, Chicago. Reviews and articles on the artist’s work have appeared in Artforum magazine, Flash Art, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice.

Jeff’s opening night reception, on Thursday Sept 11th, 6-8pm, also coincides with the opening of The Drawing Center’s ‘Fall Selections’ and Rirkrit Tiravanija shows, next door at 35 Wooster Street.