The Artist And The Brain Surgeon

On Saturday, April 30, AB NY Gallery in East Hampton will open “Two Brothers-in-Law: An Artist & Brain Surgeon” with a reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The exhibition highlights the work of William Quigley and Dr. Jeff Arle, two artists with notably different backgrounds and styles who challenge their canvases to express the extended notion of concerns and ideas.

Dr. Jeff Arle is a neurosurgeon living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. He is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, has written nine books, published endless research in neuroscience and neuromodulation and is also a passionate outdoorsman. AB NY Gallery is presenting Dr. Arle’s work to the public for the first time since he began his studio practice in 1988.

With this body of paintings which Dr. Arle describes as “Grid Works,” he attempts to move the needle in another direction in terms of evolving aspects of thought.

“I was a ‘biopsychology’ major in college back when the term ‘neuroscience’ was still somewhat in its infancy — now even up to 30% of undergraduates claim they are neuroscience majors I think,” Dr. Arle explained. “But the critical thing to me was that I was interested in what makes us who we are, and that is arguably ‘thought’ and the rest of the workings of our nervous systems. “The grids in this series of works takes on the concept of ‘how we become what we are’ in the exploration of emergence of rudimentary aspects of language — symbol, utterance, and the development of meaning and value. They are reduced down to multiple canvases to represent the multiple discrete phases in such development, and that the canvases are brought together into an ‘order,’ a specific juxtaposition, shows how the random aspects of our earliest experiences, aural and visual and touch, eventually coalesce by natural plasticity in the nervous system to the ‘order’ we call language. And it is this intrinsic quality that is unique in humans for the most part and is what we are ultimately.”

William Quigley was born in Philadelphia in 1961. He attended Philadelphia College of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Tyler School in Rome, and Columbia University Graduate School. Since 1985 he has shown in prestigious art fairs, galleries, and museums, internationally with pieces in over 450 private and public collections. Although known for portraiture, his work consists of a wide exploration of abstraction using a variety of materials, subject matter, and text.

AB NY Gallery is at 62 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. For more information visit abnygallery.com.