The Galbut Institute is pleased to present Ivy, an exhibition of four recent works by Jason Galbut. Across the show, Galbut approaches painting through a narrative logic and as a constructed surface—layered, fastened, anchored, and strapped—where pattern and material accumulate into dense, tactile fields that shift between distance and close looking.

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The titular work, Ivy, comprises 38 sealed wooden panels, each fitted with an individual cleat and faced with stretched canvas, painted with a repeating pattern of white ovals on a black background. The panels are bolted together with stainless-steel hardware to form a single continuous plane, then stabilized from behind by a white-painted frame with a grid of cross bars screwed into the back of the panels.

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Stabilization is not only built into the work from behind; it also emerges from what comes after. Hundreds of primed and white-painted stainless-steel bolts project from the panels’ surface, anchoring a network of white-painted linen straps interlaced and knotted across the painting. The straps further brace the plane from the front.

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Figurative shapes cut from sky-blue-painted linen are attached to the straps with thick blue paint, producing an impasto build-up at points of contact. Some of these shapes are fragments of a figure. Others are flipped or pancaked. Most are folded into fluid, voluminous forms that connect across the field. This layer of blue shapes has a delicate quality, contrasting with the tremendous physicality of the work as a whole.

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In Ivy, support is not a single hidden armature but a logic that repeats across the work. Layers function as both image and support, and their points of attachment—knots, overlaps, bonds—further tighten and stabilize what came before. The result is a painting in which construction accumulates as reinforcement.

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Alongside Ivy, the exhibition includes three other works that share a similar layered method. Painted forms on canvas are overlaid with metallic leaf applied in systems that allow underlying color, texture, and sometimes form to remain visible. These layers are then crossed by interconnected straps in varying densities. Season pairs a vibrant palette of yellow, red, and orange with 24-karat gold leaf arranged in diagonal lines. Medal interlocks pink and blue straps over a pattern of 24-karat gold leaf circles. Parade draws red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple across a gridded field of platinum leaf.

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In all four works, each layer is brought to a finished state—organized, precise, and rigorously detailed—before another layer is added. As surfaces are covered, earlier decisions remain partially visible. The completed works hold these accumulations in a present-tense surface that extends edge to edge, while the layering remains legible as a sequence of distinct, completed stages.

To download the full press release for Ivy, please click here.

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