Wally Gilbert had a long career in science at Harvard University before becoming an artist. He was originally a Theoretical Physicist, specializing in Quantum Field Theory, but then became an experimental Molecular Biologist. He made many discoveries in the mechanism of protein synthesis and gene regulation. He received a Nobel Award in Chemistry in 1980 for discovering a rapid way of deciphering the order of chemical groups along a DNA molecule, DNA sequencing, which changed that problem from one of extreme difficulty to one of great ease. (He shared this recombinant DNA award with Fred Sanger and Paul Berg). He left Harvard for five years to be the CEO of a biotechnology company, Biogen, and then returned to Harvard.
After he closed his laboratory in 2000, he became an artist, creating large, very colorful, often distorted digital images. He uses the iPhone camera and then overlaps and modifies those pictures in the computer, using the computer as an experimental tool to create novel images.
He began by making large images of fragments of the world, focusing on form, texture, and color, using a small digital camera. Very often these pictures were drawn from machines or from architecture. Jan Kubasiewicz, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, saw his work and organized his first one-person exhibition in 2004. He was invited to Poland, by Kubasiewicz and Jozef Zuk Piwkowski, to create an installation at the Norblin Site in Warsaw, an old decaying factory. This installation, consisting of twenty-six 12’ by 8’ hangings and thirty 36” x 24” prints face-mounted on Plexiglas, was installed at Norblin in Warsaw for two months in 2007 and then later that year in Łodz and again in Poznan in 2009. The set of thirty face-mounted prints were also exhibited in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and San Diego.
Gilbert was invited to participate in creating a book on the Boston Ballet Company. He spent several years photographing ballet dancers in rehearsal. These pictures, which capture the joy and motion of the dancers, appeared in a book on that company “Behind the Scenes at Boston Ballet” by Christine Temin with 68 pictures by Wally Gilbert.
Gilbert then moved to abstractions, first based on silhouettes derived from photographs, then to ever more abstract images based on the human head, at first still interpretable, but later in patterns having only a slight residual aspect of a biological curve. Then he created digital images, made by hand on the computer, based on geometrical forms. This work involved patterns of superimposed shrinking squares and triangles, strongly colored or in black and white, and led finally to images involving single lines.
He then spent two years exploring black and white images. Then he turned to brilliantly colored images in full saturation. Most recently he has been exploring abstractions created by superimposing several photographic images.
He has had some 50 one person shows.