Since his first one-person exhibition, at Forum Gallery in 1966, Gregory Gillespie has been recognized as one of America’s most important and arresting contemporary artists. Defying categorization, Gillespie has painted memorable self-portraits, haunting fantasy landscapes, symbolic geometric abstractions and monumental dimensional paintings unlike any other.
Born in New Jersey in 1936, Gregory Gillespie began his studies at The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art in New York and completed his BFA and MFA degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963. Awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Grant and the Chester Dale Fellowship, Gillespie traveled to Italy, studying at the American Academy and residing in Rome until 1970.
In 1970, Gregory Gillespie was given a one-person exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens. After three more exhibitions at Forum Gallery in 1968, 1970 and 1973, the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC) presented a retrospective exhibition of Gregory Gillespie’s work in 1977. The artist was forty years old. The Hirshhorn exhibition brought Gillespie into national prominence, and his work was soon shown at the Rose Art Museum (Waltham, MA), the Oklahoma Art Center (Oklahoma City), the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond).
In 1981, Gregory Gillespie was included in the landmark exhibition, "Contemporary American Realism since 1960", curated by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr. and presented by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Oakland Museum, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany. A two-person exhibition, "The Art of William Beckman and Gregory Gillespie", curated by Carl Belz, soon followed at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA in 1984.
Subsequently, Gregory Gillespie’s works were shown at museums in Greenville (SC), Wichita (KS), Trenton (NJ), San Francisco (CA), Lincoln (MA), Brooklyn (NY) and Boston (MA). In 1991-92, Gregory Gillespie was featured in the exhibition "American Realism and Figurative Art 1952-1990", which traveled to five Japanese museums.
In 1999, the year before his death, the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens) opened a retrospective exhibition of Gregory Gillespie’s work. The show traveled to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the List Visual Art Center (Cambridge, MA), and to the Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH) where it was on view from January to early March of 2000.
Gregory Gillespie’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (DC), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (La Jolla) and the Wichita Art Museum (KS). In 1994, Gregory Gillespie received the Augustus St. Gaudens Award from Cooper Union in New York. He lived in Massachusetts until his suicide in April of 2000.