Ellon Gibbs, Black Starliner, 2024
Ellon Gibbs|The Color Blue is Warm
May 3–June 28, 2025 | Gallery 495, Catskill
Gallery 495 proudly presents The Color Blue is Warm, a solo exhibition of new works by Ellon Gibbs at Gallery 495 in Catskill, New York, in tandem with his presentation at Independent Art Fair. The title, The Color Blue is Warm, gestures toward the central paradox in this body of work: blue as a color that resists easy definition.
Drawing on the historical and cultural complexity of blue—its ties to lapis lazuli, denim, mysticism, and danger—Gibbs wields the color as a force of contradiction: a warning and an embrace, serene and apocalyptic, cooling and combustible. In these richly layered paintings, figures are caught mid-motion—running, resisting, surviving—set against feverish landscapes saturated with deep blues, ceruleans, and teals that burn as much as they soothe. Gibbs uses blue as an emotional and narrative agent, channeling its ability to shift from sky to sea, from ice to flame, from grief to fury. The series reflects on blue’s role as a signal—both of danger and divinity—and as an untouchable mirror for the world around us.
Blue, in Gibbs' world, is no longer cool. It is rage and riot. It is an oceanic force, the eye of a hurricane, the skin after frostbite. It is as ancient as indigo and as modern as denim, as sacred as lapis and as volatile as flame. The Color Blue is Warm is a meditation on contradiction, collapse, and the cyclical nature of destruction and rebirth.
Ellon Gibbs|Ambush in the Night
May 8–11, 2025 | Spring Studios, New York
Gallery 495 is proud to present a solo booth by Brooklyn-based artist Ellon Gibbs at the 2025 Independent Art Fair, running from May 8–11. Gibbs, 29-year-old artist from Brownsville, NY, brings a striking new body of work that explores the primal relationship between humanity and nature—raw, unfiltered, and urgent.
Gibbs' paintings feel both ancient and contemporary, existing in an enigmatic space that is unplaceable yet deeply familiar. His figures are locked in moments of survival—running, attacking, clinging to life—set against landscapes saturated in color, almost aflame. The unseen presence of fire and destruction hints at an underlying unraveling, a reflection of societal fractures and looming crisis.
Subtle yet unflinching, Gibbs' work offers a brutal commentary on contemporary life. His dystopian environments speak to a learned disconnect—between ourselves and nature, between our food sources, between our fellow humans. Growing up in the populated architecture of New York City, he reflects on the paradox of urban life: millions living side by side, yet isolated within their own apartments or screens.
Within the chaos, there is a call for return, a return to something instinctual, rooted in our mammalian nature. This series, while dark and evocative of end times, suggests a path forward: a reckoning with what we’ve lost and what we might reclaim.
