Aaron Gilbert’s paintings depict fleeting domestic moments and intimate, ordinary gestures as powerful installments in the sweeping continuum of human life. In portraits and tableaux alike, Gilbert’s scenes demonstrate our enduring capacity for love, connection, and care, even in the face of cruel historical forces. As if bearing the weight of the world—or the pressures of late capitalism—on their shoulders, his figures are at once particular people and sacred archetypes, capable of transiting multiple realities simultaneously. Scenes firmly rooted in the material world seem to hover within a larger cosmological story, one Gilbert makes visible through chance tears and atmospheric glimpses. On haunted urban corners, familiar corporate logos double as ancient symbols, while spectral beings and prophetic energies suggest the warp and weft of past and future. In keeping with this embrace of time-as-subject, Gilbert’s formal approach to both figurative and narrative painting places him in an art historical lineage that links Byzantine iconography to Italian Renaissance masterworks, and George Tooker’s psychological symbolism to the edifying social realism of WPA murals.

Gilbert was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Sant-Andrea de Scaphis in Rome (2022). He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gladstone, Brussels (2026) and New York (2025); Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); and presented a two-person exhibition with Martin Wong at P.P.O.W., New York (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Shifting Landscapes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); The Slipstream: Reflection and Resistance in the Art of Our Time, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2021); Picturing Motherhood Now: Images of A New Era, The Cleveland Museum of Art (2021); and American Identities, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2014). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Columbus Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Gilbert lives and works in New York.