Born New York in 1951, Komarin studied with the seminal New York School painter Philip Guston at Boston University. Recipient of the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, the NY Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting, the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting etc, he has held professorships at a host of universities. A master of Post-Painterly Abstraction, Gary Komarin has been at the forefront of contemporary art with a bold and colourful style recognized by art collectors worldwide, and applauded by museum curators and art critics alike.

Post-painterly abstraction is a style that favours openness, risk taking, and clarity, as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces that are apparent in abstract expressionism. Komarin’s style offers a freshness of approach that taps in the present zeitgeist. “My paintings proceed without preconception. I paint to find out what it is I am going to paint. I think of myself as a stagehand who sets up the conditions necessary for drama to unfold. The very best paintings are most often those that fail the most. Once a painting has achieved a life of its own, when it speaks back to you as a painter, that is a good place to be. For me, the best paintings are those that paint themselves.” [Gary Komarin]

For most artists there is no eureka moment; instead ideas develop through practice and over time, one thing leading to the next, and Gary Komarin is particularly sensitive to this intuitive process. If his marks appear awkward and childlike, it's because he has learned over the years how to turn off his internal critic and work from a place of detachment that allows for freshness, newness, and authenticity. Komarin has built into his working method ways of keeping himself from over-thinking or becoming too precious — techniques that allow him to get out of the way and almost let the painting paint itself. "When I have to become involved," he says, "is when it can feel burdensome.” [Carol Diehl]

Komarin has shown all over the world and shared exhibitions in America with Rothko, Dubuffet and Basquiat to name just a few. He is represented in many MOMA galleries. Cakes for him are a marriage between the domestic and the architectural; he credits his mother’s cake baking, as well as his father’s career as an architect in Vienna, as the genesis for this theme.