“My paintings border on being abstract, but abstraction in a way that means clarity—not like nonobjective paintings, but having the essence of something,” Barry Gealt explained to an interviewer for Bloom magazine in 2012. Born in Philadelphia in 1941, Gealt attended the Philadelphia College of Art for his BFA and then received a MFA with honors from Yale University in 1965. From 1969 until his retirement in 2007 he was a professor of Fine Arts in the painting program at Indiana University’s School of Fine Arts (now part of the university’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design). His wife, the art historian Adelheid Gealt, is director emeritus of the university’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art. In the early 1980s he changed the focus of his work from figure painting to landscapes with the stated aim of making the art less about human narratives and more about the experience of looking and seeing. He manipulates his paint with a number of forceful techniques, sometimes applying it in thick layers that echo the tactile, textured heaviness he sees in the landscape itself. His imagery is often inspired by the countryside near his home in Spencer, Indiana, or by his frequent trips to Maine. Gealt’s works in painting and fused glass have been exhibited in North America and Europe, with solo exhibitions in New York, Nebraska, Canada, and Germany. He has been collected by numerous institutions, including the Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana, the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, and the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy.
