BIO

Gary Kret (b. 1953, Wyandotte Michigan) explores the tension between power and vulnerability through the language of architecture and the human form. Working across sculpture, drawing, and painting, he combines carved marble, long associated with permanence and authority with cast bronze figures that suggest fragility, introspection, and restraint. Kret received his BFA from Aquinas College and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art. His practice has evolved over decades into a sustained investigation of monuments, conflict, and the psychological weight of built structures. Towers, walls, and barriers recur throughout his work, acting as both symbols of dominance and sites of quiet human tension. Kret’s sculptures often place minimal, human-like forms in relationship to imposing architectural elements, creating moments where emotion is withheld, concealed, or barely expressed. This interplay reflects a broader concern with how power is projected and how it is experienced internally. The artist has participated in exhibitions at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Wharton Esherick Museum, Malvern, PA; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington DC; American Drawing Biennial College of William and Mary. He is the recipient of the Fannie B. Pardee Prize, Polish Heritage Grants, and a 2024 Purchase Grant from the DC Art Bank Program. His work has been exhibited in regional galleries and is held in private collections.

Statement

My studio process is interwoven with Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture influencing one and other. Across these disciplines I use architectural forms towers, walls, barricades, and monuments as symbols of human actions. The human presence is reduced to minimal, anthropomorphic forms heads, gestures, or figures that appear anonymous, diminished, and silent. They suggest a condition of observation, endurance, or quiet resistance rather than confrontation.

My current works are about the recollections of my adolescence especially from early encounters with images of war films, those depictions of struggle, and reconstructed memories that blurred the line between observation and imagination. These images continue to surface in my work, shaping an ongoing examination of conflict not as spectacle, but as something absorbed, remembered, and reinterpreted.

Rather than depicting events, the work focuses on traces and fragments of recollections, and structures that have been used throughout history to represent human actions. These fragments continue to surface in my work, shaping an ongoing examination of conflict not as spectacle, but as something absorbed, remembered, and reinterpreted. Meaning is shaped as much by memory and perception as by the work itself.

I am pointing a finger saying, “This is who we are.”

Gary Kret CV

Education

1978 MFA in Sculpture, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT

1975 BFA in Painting and Sculpture, Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI

Exhibitions

2024 Sculpture NOW 2024

McLean Project for the Arts

2023 DC Art Now 2023

DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

2022 Home as Self

Wharton Esherick Museum’s 28th annual juried exhibition.

2021 Inside Outside, Upside Down

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

2020 Sculpture Now 2020

McLean Project For the Arts, McLean VA

2019 By the People

Monochrome Collective Exhibition Washington DC

Art Night

WPA & Hickok/Cole Washington DC

Superfine Art Fair

Washington DC

2018 Superfine Art Fair

Washington, DC

Art on Location: Out of the Studio

Bethesda, MD

The Theory of Color: Exploring Monochrome in Art

Artist’s Proof Gallery, Washington, D.C.

1996 Maryland State Government House, Annapolis, MD

1994 American Drawing Biennial

College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA

The 32nd Irene Leach Memorial Exhibition

The Chrysler Museum Norfolk, VA

1990 Aquinas College Art Gallery

Grand Rapids, MI

1985 Aquinas College Art Gallery

Grand Rapids, MI

1983 Maryland Biennial 1983 Works on Paper

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

1978 Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Northeast-Southeast Exchange Exhibit

Atlanta, GA

Real Art Ways

Hartford, CT

1977 Annual Midwest Museum Association Urban Institute for Contemporary Art

Grand Rapids, MI

Publications

2018 Studio Visit Magazine Volume 41-42

2016 Studio Visit Magazine Volume 35

Grants

1974 Polish Heritage Grants

1978 The Fannie B. Pardee Prize

2013 FY 2024 DC Art Bank Program Grant