Alteronce Gumby at Jeffrey Deitch

Alteronce Gumby, Walk on the Moon (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Charles White.

Alteronce Gumby’s Walk on the Moon at Jeffrey Deitch roots viewers in a space outside of chronological time, conjuring both the materials of our world and more cosmic atmospheres. Throughout the exhibition’s four subspaces, he presents mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and an installation of sheer panels affixed to existing skylights, their fabric gradients of pink, green, orange, and blue pooling on the floor like the frozen base of a waterfall. Nearby, Luminaire (all works 2025), freestanding resin sculptures embedded with garnet and rose quartz, continue this metaphysical activation, their translucent forms resembling portals. Throughout, Gumby uses the language of abstraction to model an experience in which perception, influence, and material overlap and unfold simultaneously rather than adhering to a singular path. 

At the front of the exhibition, paintings incorporating stones, glass, acrylic, and resin on their panel surfaces toggle perception between the micro- and macroscopic. In Walking Into Sunshine (Whitten), citrine, copper, and glass forms a richly textured yellow-green plane that looks geologic up close, each reflective protrusion keeping the surface active and unstable. From afar, the work settles into a color field, a triangle tightening into view at its center. Meaning accrues through an accumulation of these shifting vantage points. In these works, Gumby explores how our perception operates in multiple, intersecting states. 

This multiplicity applies to Gumby’s reference to other artists. The paintings’ titles, nodding to figures in movements from Art Informel to visionary abstraction, recast the history of abstraction as a web of influence rather than a linear progression. Works like Sky and Sea (Gilliam) and Land of Make Believe (Albers) register points of contact with earlier practices, positioning Gumby within a broad constellation of approaches to color and form. His visual language accommodates multiple simultaneous histories—its African continental and diasporic foundations,¹ its spiritual line, and its European modernist tradition—all circulating at once. 

Color in Nature elegantly captures this sense of concurrence. A wall work comprised of horizontal resin panels embedded with printed photographs, stones, and a monarch butterfly, its shape recalls a timeline, but its logic resists direct temporal progression. Rather, it commingles deep time (geological fragments), lived time (photographs of figures in community), and ecological time (a preserved butterfly). Here, abstraction enables a more spiritual reflection on our physical existence—its materiality, its lived texture—through the ongoing assembly of perception, influence, and material into a single, experiential whole. Throughout Walk on the Moon, Gumby uses abstraction and its history to reveal how our existence is not defined by linear succession or hierarchies, but by a deep sense of simultaneity.

Alteronce Gumby, Sky and Sea (Gilliam) (2025). Agates, lapis lazuli, quartz, copper, resin, glass, and acrylic on panel, 72 x 79 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

Alteronce Gumby, Dancing in the Milky Way (2025). Amethyst, calcite, smoky quartz, resin, painted glass, and acrylic on panel, 96 x 156 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

Alteronce Gumby: Walk on the Moon runs from November 15, 2025-January 17, 2026 at Jeffrey Deitch (925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles, 90038).

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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