Greg Gould: Popping Surrealism at The Hive Gallery

Front and center of the illustrious list of luminaries currently displaying their work at the Hive Gallery on 7th and Spring, you will find the name Greg Gould. As a self-described “pop surrealist”, Gould’s art runs the gamut of style, aesthetic, and discipline — the output of a bold mind never content to settle for the expected or the ordinary.

Fed up with the grating grind of the New York scene, Gould returned to Los Angeles, where a fortuitous CraigsList posting led him straight to a nascent gallery which was just opening its doors— The Hive.

“With every step (I took) I always wanted to build upon it to get to the next step,” recalls Gould of his formative years. “When I was in college, I would look for coffee houses to hang work…I tried to seek out as many opportunities as I could. I took a semester in Australia and…work that I’d done was then shown in a gallery there. (Next) I met this artist during my senior year of college…working in New York. So then I decided to move out there and we’d spend a few months out of every year meeting curators and people I’d studied in school. But she was a very abrasive person, so it was really intense during those years.”

From day one, Gould was accepted with open arms, and he soon sparked an artistic kinship with Hive creator Nathan Cartwright. “It was totally lucky timing,” says Gould. “The Hive is very open. If you talk to people of a certain generation, you had to submit artwork to galleries and it would be on slides. There was this old guard of curators, and it was a power thing. But the Hive kind of exploded that (to me). It was so easy to network and get involved… it’s a scene of… experimentation.”

The Hive Gallery has stood as one of the foremost artistic hubs in the Downtown LA area for well over a decade now and continues to push the envelope of creativity with its dynamic roster of in-house talent.

Imbued with a newfound creative freedom, Gould has since gone on to try his hand at an ever-evolving list of diverse aesthetic endeavors. In his words: “that’s the thing about being an artist these days. In the past, there were people who were painters and that’s what they did…but with multimedia you can’t just be one thing anymore. That’s good in a way because it forces your brain to keep reinventing and coming up with new ideas.”

And reinvent Gould has, starting with an ongoing public works project which involves painting unique designs onto street utility boxes. “Over the past few years there’s been so much red tape for public art,” admits Gould.

“But there’s this go-between with utility boxes. I had a friend whose organization teamed up with the city council. I thought it was really cool to…spice things up (on) these grey boxes. One of my designs was chosen… so I did one in 2015, but whenever (a box) pops up I’d take it. There was one in the Palms neighborhood, then Manhattan Beach said… we want to open ours up to a resident down here (and) I live in the South Bay. You’ve just gotta keep…collecting these notches.”

Simultaneously, Gould also began to explore 3-D printing as a high-tech means of creating dimensional mixed media pieces.

“I used to work on surfaces… painting and drawing,” says Gould. “Then at one point we had a doll show and the idea came up to make a…sculptural lamp. I started doing that and one idea led to another…. I know a lot of people are doing 3D printing and that it’s nothing new, but it’s still kind of a Wild West. For me, though, it’s a high tech pencil to be used to create with. There’s a big learning curve to this stuff… but that’s how you understand how to use the medium — banging your head against the wall over and over again.”

Gould hasn’t stopped there. Since 2012, he’s come to dabble in cartooning, producing witty and fresh current events strips with an absurdist edge. He also has created a series of works depicting “distressed structures” rendered in blue paints. Per Gould: “You think of Chernobyl and these places where…nature kind of takes back over. (Or) places like Detroit where there are these amazing structures but due to external conditions they’re starting to rot. There’s a strange beauty to that. I was working on distressed wood where you can see the grains and fibers to it…but I twist and tweak it to animate it a bit. To imbue it with its own life force.

In looking back, Gould credits his older sister for jump-starting his love of art by taking him to museums as a child to view the works of René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. As he grew older, Gould developed a taste for the heightened contemporary works of Jeff Koons, only to become disillusioned after a chance meeting with the man himself. “I was at a show in New York and I met him,” remembers Gould. “I don’t usually get excited, but I was so starstruck. But… he was the most uninteresting guy you could imagine. Very nice, but not interesting. I was really let down.” To wit, Gould blames rapidly inflating costs of living in art centers like New York for what he sees as the corporatization of the scene: “you have to be BlueChip to exist in New York.

There’s tons of artists…but as a bigger picture (the cost) cracks down on the ability to be a vibrant scene… To me, an artist really has to figure out who they are and what they do, and from that, they form their identity. That becomes your voice in this sea of so many people in the art world. So… in LA (the scene) is wide open to that.”

If you’re in need of proof of that statement, look no further than the Hive Gallery. “It’s… a great time (at the Hive),” confirms Gould. “I’ll be there and I want everyone to come down to check it out.”

To see more of Greg Gould’s art, check out his website, as well as his official Instagram. If you’d like to contact him, you may do so directly at Greg@gouldeyecandy.com. The Hive Gallery is located at 729 S Spring St, Los Angeles, CA 90014.