The Brooklyn Rail

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison’s words from her renowned novel Beloved resonate throughout Real Monsters in Bold Colors, an exhibition that brings together figurative painter Bob Thompson’s kaleidoscopic reinterpretations of art history with Candida Alvarez’s vibrant abstractions, the latter born from personal memory. At GRAY’s New York space, on view from April 30 through July 3, 2025, the show creates an intergenerational dialogue between Thompson (1937–66) and Alvarez (b. 1955), artists whose use of color and form transcends conventional boundaries to create what Alvarez calls “liberation” in paint.

The exhibition includes Thompson’s works from 1960 through 1965 alongside new paintings by Alvarez crafted specifically for this show. The former’s monumental painting The Judgement of Paris (1963) anchors the exhibition, its oil-on-canvas surface exemplifying the Black American artist’s radical style in which vivid figures dissolve into flat planes of intense color. In it, a sweeping tree becomes a vertical axis, while multihued silhouettes transform mythological actors into chromatic fields, and a series of natural elements—verdant trees, rolling hills, and fresh water—stand in the background. The artist’s riffs on the old masters become vehicles for insertion into a canon that historically excluded artists like him.

La Promenade (1965), rendered in oil on canvas at a more intimate scale, illustrates Thompson’s ability to compress narrative intensity into smaller formats. In this work, a pair of brown and yellow figures, male and female, move through a green landscape alongside a white dog, their nude forms both recognizable and abstract, culminating in a dreamlike procession that evokes movement through time. Meanwhile, his Triptych (ca. 1960), an early horizontal triptych on wood panel, is more experimental yet filled with natural elements and silhouetted human figures; the three-panel format anticipates the serial explorations that Alvarez would undertake decades later.

Alvarez acknowledges Thompson as inspiration, stating that while few painters will disclose their influences, Thompson gave her the courage to look at paintings and use them as a starting point for her new works. The Puerto Rican-American artist’s series responds directly to this inheritance. The commanding cbob 1 (2024), executed in acrylic on linen, features biomorphic forms that writhe and pulse across the surface; deep blues, browns, and greens anchor the composition, while yellows, purples, and reds create explosive moments that echo Thompson’s most dynamic paintings.

Two mid-sized works, cbob 5 and cbob 6 (both 2025) reinforce Alvarez’s mastery of the square format. In the former, shapes in colors such as turquoise, yellow, purple, and gray interlock like puzzle pieces, creating spatial ambiguities reminiscent of Thompson’s flattened picture planes. Meanwhile, cbob 6 pushes further into abstraction with overlapping forms that suggest both landscape and figure without committing to either, a visual strategy that extends Thompson’s between-space into new territory entirely.

The exhibition title, drawn from poet Hettie Jones’s essay on Thompson, positions both artists as creators of “real monsters”—not in the sense of horror, but as figures of resistance and misunderstood beauty. Like Mary Shelley’s fictional Frankenstein’s monster, their works represent creative reassembly in that they challenge notions of purity and canon, becoming beautiful monsters that refuse simple or convenient categorization.

Historical context plays an integral role in the exhibition. Born in Kentucky, Thompson emerged in 1960s New York when Abstract Expressionism dominated the contemporary art space, yet he insisted on figuration while simultaneously manipulating, or paying homage to, European traditions. Alvarez came of age artistically in the 1980s, moving through an art world still resistant to women artists of color. Their parallel challenges echo what art historian Kobena Mercer identifies in Black modernisms—how artists of color must negotiate belonging to and standing apart from Western art traditions. Both artists employ what Édouard Glissant has coined “poetics of relation” by asserting their right to redefine artistic language on their own terms.

Real Monsters in Bold Colors reveals how visual languages can be passed down and transformed even as the dialogue between the two artists extends past formal similarities; the viewer will note Thompson’s flattened figures create a transitional space between abstraction and figuration that Alvarez pushes even further. The exhibition presents a model for how artistic influence can move across generations, as both artists demonstrate how “monsters”—or those who refuse to conform to established norms—can expand our understanding of what painting can accomplish for the viewer or create new compositional languages entirely.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Hendrik Folkerts and coincides with Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey at El Museo del Barrio. The dual presentations confirm both artists as celebrated voices in American art, connected by their shared desire to reimagine figurative painting through bold colors and liberated form.