Doyle Gertjejansen received his MFA degree with a major in painting and minor in art history from the University of Minnesota. He has resided in New Orleans for most of his professional career, teaching and serving as chairman of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of New Orleans. In New Orleans his work has been represented by the Arthur Roger Gallery, Galerie Simonne Stern, and currently, Gallery Bienvenu. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center and the Arts Council of New Orleans, and served in many other positions in the community and at the University of New Orleans.
His work has been exhibited in numerous one-person and group exhibitions and is included in public, private, and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad. In 1996 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting and the Phi Kappa Phi South Central Artist’s Award. He has received numerous other grants, awards, and honors including a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship for painting and works on paper in 1999.
Gertjejansen has been creating large scale mixed media abstractions for over three decades. His primary body of work also includes drawings and works on paper, monotypes, and sculpture. The most recent work focuses on complex layers of abstract and pictorial imagery drawn from his personal history, the history of art, contemporary philosophy, science, and other disciplines.
One of the challenges in making abstract paintings today, is to embrace elements that here-to-fore have been intentionally placed outside of its boundaries. Instead of rejecting elements of illusionist space and all references to the world beyond the language of painting itself, most abstract painters in the last two decades have been pursuing unique and individual strategies to incorporate illusion and image into the language of abstraction, while allowing the painting to still read as a singularly powerful and experiential moment based on sensuality, as opposed to a metaphor based in text.
That broader view of contemporary abstraction is reflected in my own work, where I hope the audience will experience the space of pictographic art, Renaissance perspective, the flat space of contemporary painting, picture making and formal abstraction. In the paintings, the obvious and the arbitrary, awkward or elegant, contrived and authentic events live in the same world at the same time, and have equal consequences. I believe the power of painting is still rooted in sensual experience, and in its ability provide a direct record of the uniquely human practice of invention.