Timeline

Gale Antokal suspends her drawings in an ambiguous space between reality and abstraction: a lone person rowing into oblivion; birds frozen in flight; a figure skating on veined ice. These are the moments, seemingly small, that lodge in the psyche and form identity. Working from photographs, she crops in on the forms that transcend time and setting, leaving enough detail to invite empathy, although not enough to identify. By narrowing the field of vision, she distills scenes into memories, situation into subconscious. Early in her art career, Antokal created color-rich pastel portraits of mundane solid forms – bowling balls, plates. Over the years, her focus has shifted to evanescent events and places. The tug of mortality is ever present in her art. From a distance, her drawings appear more realistic than they are; up close, they dissolve into abstraction. Figures melt into shapes; edges blur into softness. A native of New York, Antokal earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Long Island University before moving westward to study for her BFA and MFA in painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She is a Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University in the Department of Art and Art History. Antokal held several visiting artist positions and teaching positions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor of Art History at the Lehrhaus Institute, and the American College in Jerusalem. She was an affiliate faculty member in the JSSItaly program in Civita Castellana, Italy in 2015. In 1991, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship. Her work resides in many private, public, and corporate collections, including the Four Seasons Hotel in Dubai and the Millennium Tower in San Francisco.