NEW YORK, NY.- It is with great sadness that Pavel Zoubok Gallery mourns the loss of their gallery artist and friend Charles McGill (1964-2017), who died at the age of 53 on Sunday, July 9 near his home in Peekskill, New York, following a brief and courageous battle with cancer.

Trained as a figurative painter, McGill was best known as a sculptor, creating powerful assemblages of vinyl, leather, plastic and hardware culled from repurposed golf bags that embody a specifically masculine struggle with abstraction, race and class. His deconstruction of this loaded cultural symbol was both a physical and psychological struggle. Its evocative fragments established a formal vocabulary that bears this stress plainly: deliberation in flayed slabs, frustration in wrested chunks, fervor in ousted masses. Appended to substrates or submitted to piecemeal assembly, these components were reconfigured into forms that convey a range of intellectual and corporeal maneuvers.

"Charles McGill is an artist’s artist...McGill never loses sight of beauty and craft—it’s what makes his work readily accessible on multiple levels simultaneously." - Joe Lewis (from The Elusive Eagle: Charles McGill and the Anti-Trope)

Charles McGill exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Wadsworth Atheneum, Lehman College Art Gallery, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. His performances, sculptures and installations have met with critical praise from Art in America, The International Review of African American Art, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail and Artnet Magazine. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and Art Matters. Additionally, he was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design. In 2016 his first solo museum exhibition, "Front Line, Back Nine" (curated by Kathleen Goncharov), opened at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. In addition to his art practice, McGill was a beloved educator, most recently at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY).

A celebration of Charles McGill's art and life is being planned for our fall season with details to follow.