Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 1:00 PM to Saturday, January 17, 2026 at 1:00 PM
Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles
Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to present Walk on the Moon, an exhibition of new work by Alteronce Gumby, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Structured around four separate yet intertwined movements that incorporate each facet of Gumby’s ever-evolving practice—from painting, to sculpture, to installation and sound— Walk on the Moon presents the latest discoveries and innovations from his sustained research into and exploration of the material properties of color and how they shape human perception.A pillar of Gumby’s work and primary vehicle for his experimentation with color has been a form of abstract painting entirely his own, one that incorporates mirrors and acrylics, colored glass and a vast array of gemstones, from agate to quartz, lapis to malachite. In a suite of six new square ‘tonal’ paintings, Gumby organizes his palette around a single color unique to each one, resulting in intensely concentrated expressions of a given hue or tonality. Placed throughout each composition are ‘organites’ that Gumby creates using gemstones, conductive metals, and resin. Channeling the energetic properties of color into each organite, Gumby deploys them as magnifiers of that very energy. Though the shifting and shimmering surfaces of each painting change according to the available light in a given environment, several remain anchored by the presence of sacred geometry—the square, pyramid, and circle—hovering within their compositions. Along with the inclusion of our mirrored reflection, these fundamental forms open up portals for the imagination.Gumby’s expansive command of abstraction is further revealed by an eclectic group of paintings that accompany the tonal works. In three ‘Black-body’ paintings, Gumby manipulates and forms resin into strips of prismatic color that evoke the full spectrum of primary color that refracts through light. Four ‘falling rainbow’ paintings made of monochromatic resin with gemstones suspended within are affixed with naturally and synthetic dyed silks that flow down from the picture plane and pool onto the gallery floor, allowing Gumby to explore the transition of color from the material to the immaterial. In Color in Nature (2025) Gumby joins together five colored resin squares, with the palette and corresponding gemstone within each made to express both the idea and experience of the photographic image embedded within. Completing this movement is one of the largest shaped paintings Gumby has made yet, Dancing in the Milky Way (2025), that staggers two horizontal panels together, one atop the other—their radiant surfaces evoking the cosmos itself.Continuing his investigation into the different ways color can be felt, seen, or understood, Gumby has created new monolithic resin sculptures that reference the same color palette as the tonal paintings. Alternating between density and translucency, between opacity and luminosity, these hulking yet ethereal objects capture the way color is transfigured by passing through material. Each sculpture presents a concentrated expression of red, blue, green, yellow, or violet and contains gemstones suspended within them.The final movement of Walk on the Moon and one that synthesizes the preceding forays into color, material, experience, and time, is an installation that harnesses the natural light that pours into the gallery via its skylights. Taking naturally and synthetic dyed silks and affixing them to the skylights to create what Gumby calls ‘light wells,’ these sculptural iterations of the ‘falling rainbow’ paintings reconsider the very materiality of color and its atmospheric or environmental quality. This room will also function as an experimental space where invited artists working with sound will stage one-day performances, offering their own vision of what color is and how it can be experienced. The fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the installation demonstrates the boundlessness of Gumby's practice as he endeavors to understand color as both an earthly fact and abstract idea.