Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, textiles, craft
Website: jamesgobel.art
James Gobel was born in 1972 in Portland, Oregon. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1996), where he studied under the influential art critic Dave Hickey, before completing his Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999). He lives and works in San Francisco and has been a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the California College of the Arts (CCA) since 2005, where he co-chairs the MFA in Fine Arts Program.
Gobel’s work came to national attention with a solo exhibition in the Hammer Projects series at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2000. He was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award in 2009, one of the region’s most prestigious honors for mid-career artists. His work has been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous exhibition catalogs.
Over the course of his career, Gobel has exhibited widely across the United States and internationally, with solo shows at Kravets/Wehby Gallery in New York, Marx & Zavattero and et al. etc. in San Francisco, Steve Turner Contemporary and de boer in Los Angeles, and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco. Group exhibition venues have included the Orange County Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, the Leslie+Lohman Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Des Moines Art Center, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles.
Gobel is best known for paintings constructed through a process akin to felt marquetry: intricate compositions of hand-cut felt, yarn, embroidery thread, acrylic paint, enamel, plastic buttons, and rhinestones layered onto canvas or wood. His early work depicted bear culture—a gay subculture that celebrates large, heavily-built men—elevating its subjects to iconic status through compositions that draw on Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, German Neue Sachlichkeit painting (particularly Christian Schad and Otto Dix), Japonism, and Pop Art. The resulting images are simultaneously warm, witty, and unsettling, presenting figures who appear comfortable and confident in domestic or leisure settings.
Over time his practice has expanded to incorporate vintage 19th-century ledger paper, oil, flashe paint, and sculptural elements made from air-dry clay and found objects. His “Charles Laughton Papers” series (begun around 2020) shifted from direct figuration toward an archival approach, exploring the life of the closeted gay Hollywood actor through found documents and collaged materials. In his most recent work, Gobel constructs calibrated fields of color in flashe paint punctuated by linear passages of embroidered text, signatures, dates, and personal symbols—what he has described as “small theaters” of queer memory, preservation, and coded communication.
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