Memory Be Green: Carlisle Bell

Runs / February 3 – March 26, 2023

Reception / First Friday, February 3, 6-9 PM
Gallery Hours / Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

This February Grizzly Grizzly presents paintings by Carlisle Bell in Memory Be Green, his first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. For Memory be Green, Bell fills the space with new works and paintings from his past that fluctuate from grotesque to beautiful, slip between the real and surreal, and tease the illusory from the commonplace. The purposeful installation of his paintings, overpowering the room and the viewer’s psyche, reinforce Bell’s aggressive painting style. Both the work and the viewer are left with little room to breathe.

Bell’s title, Memory Be Green references a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that refers to the death of King Hamlet, “Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother's death, the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief...” In the beginning of the play, the word green is used to mean “new” or “fresh,” as in, the memory is fresh and, therefore, not healed. To Bell, the reference to the unhealed memory in the show title points to his green memories that are painful or difficult for him to suppress. Bell’s expressive brush strokes convey his love of and frustration in chasing the elusive and amorphous nature of memory. Bell paints his green memories with great care and detail, a beautiful dress, a fly on a table, or an amorphic shape bulging from the canvas. Other memories, “quickly ripen and rot, leaving us scarcely aware that a memory was ever there at all.” Rotten memories are distorted by time, interpreted differently by repetition within our own heads. This mimics Bell’s repetition of form until the image itself comes undone.

Bell writes, “Sometimes we go looking for these rotted memories. Sometimes we find them. Sometimes not. In either case, we are searching with the hope that the memory be green.” Bell’s paintings synthesize both memories fresh and accessible with those rotten and distorted. He hopes memories can remain fresh and green but by his own hand, they ripen and rot.

Artist Bio

Iowa-born and Philadelphia-based painter Carlisle Bell references objects and shapes from impressionist modernist paintings, sometimes recognizable and other times hidden in the depths of his pictorial space. Working quickly on multiple canvases at once with highly saturated color, Bell continuously reworks a single subject until the form itself falls apart. According to Carlisle, “He is six feet and three-quarter inches tall and is slightly overweight at two hundred and seventy pounds. In boxing, this is the ‘heavyweight’ weight class. In professional wrestling and mixed martial arts, it is ‘super heavyweight.’ In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it is ‘ultra-heavyweight.’” Bell received his BA degree in Philosophy from Northern Iowa University and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Delaware. His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently, at the Delaware Contemporary in DE, James Oliver Gallery in PA, and WIRWIR in Berlin, Germany.