Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Philadelphia-based artist Bruce Pollock, whose paintings of forms found in nature add to the ongoing tradition of landscape painting at the gallery. The exhibition, titled Nature, features three distinct areas of Pollock’s practice, namely his Ciphers, Plant and Planet, as well as Fractal Forest series. Each focuses on recurring patterns and perpetual sequences observed in the natural world. These phenomena are of significant mathematical and scientific interest, and also create the structure of Pollock’s painted form. There is an appreciation for the micro and the macro, the near and far, and the ephemeral and the infinite.

Unlike the traditional landscape format, Pollock’s paintings are oriented vertically. Instead of a horizontal vista that favors ground or sky, Pollock’s works are often symmetrically bifurcated by a strong central plant-like form in his Plant And Planet compositions. There is a sense of viewing the plant forms on a Z-axis, or rather over time intervals as opposed to a singular moment in nature being recorded. His saturated colors and bright schemas are at times more symbolic than literal. Reds and yellows seemingly indicate growth and life, while blues can be read as representative of the incremental patterns measuring and giving shape to planes and voids. In leveraging and nurturing these color relationships, Pollock expresses motifs of the metaphysical and the innate.