On a cold, overcast day in late February of this year, in the studio out back of her home in Baroda, Michigan, the artist Candida Alvarez is finishing a series of paintings for an upcoming exhibition at Gray gallery in New York City.
“Real Monsters in Bold Colors,” on view through July 3, puts ten new works by Alvarez in dialogue with seven works by Bob Thompson, the celebrated painter whose artistic career was cut short when he died in 1966, less than a month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.
