Michael Gorman (b. 1963), is a true painter of the Post-War contemporary American zeitgeist. A renegade, an outlaw, a bon vivant of the big sky ennui of cowboy destinies and the infinite promise of blacktop highways. His canvases are a balance of restrained chaos and Jungian archetypes: the artist as myth, as explorer, as pleasure seeker, as poet, as shamanic manifestation of pop cultural psychology. Born and raised between Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, Gorman’s visual palette borrows from this Western tableaux of neon signage, semi-abstract forms, shimmering heat mirages, dark penumbras, and layers of materiality, filled with the kinetic potential of opportunity riding on the razor blade edge of disillusionment and entropy. This tension, a painterly contrast of formal and informal representation, is what makes Gorman’s paintings so electrifying and so connected to the American art historical lineage—from Ed Ruscha to Cy Twombly to Jasper Johns to Robert Rauschenberg. Painters of the nuclear age, color television, political assassinations, and social unrest. But in Gorman’s work, just under the surface of rebellion, is a vibrating romanticism, a vulnerability that is tender, like a warm desert sunset.