Since his first one-person exhibition, at Forum Gallery in 1966, Gregory Gillespie (American, 1936–2000) has been recognized as one of America’s most important and interesting Contemporary artists. Defying categorization, Gillespie has painted memorable self-portraits, haunting fantasy landscapes, symbolic geometric abstractions, and monumental dimensional paintings.

Gillespie began his art studies at the Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art in New York. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1962, and received the Chester Dale Fellowship to continue his work and study at the American Academy in Rome, where he resided from 1964 to 1970. In 1970, Gillespie was given a solo exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens. After three more exhibitions at Forum Gallery in 1968, 1970, and 1973, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., presented a retrospective exhibition of Gillespie’s work in 1977. The artist was 40 years old. The Hirshhorn exhibition brought Gillespie into national prominence, and his work was soon shown at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA; the Oklahoma Art Center in Oklahoma City, OK; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. In 1981, Frank Goodyear, Jr. included Gillespie in the landmark exhibition of American Realism organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that traveled to Richmond, VA; Oakland, CA; Lisbon, Portugal; and Munich and Nuremberg, Germany.

In 1984, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University organized a two-person exhibition of paintings by Gillespie and William Beckman that traveled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California. Subsequently, Gillespie’s works were shown at museums in Greenville, SC; Wichita, KS; Trenton, NJ; San Francisco, CA; Lincoln, MA; Brooklyn, NY; and Boston, MA. Between 1991 and 1992, Gillespie was featured in the traveling exhibition American Realism and Figurative Art 1952–1990, which toured to five Japanese museums.

Gillespie’s work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, which was shown at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and at the List Visual Art Center in Cambridge, MA, in 1999, and at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, from January to early March 2000.

Gillespie’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Wichita Art Museum. In 1994, Gillespie received the Augustus St. Gaudens Award from Cooper Union in New York.

He lived in Massachusetts until his death in April 2000.