Garrett Gassman (b. Portland, Oregon) is an American contemporary artist working across conceptual photography and mixed media painting. His practice explores the psychology of human experience, focusing on how memory and emotion construct and fracture our understanding of truth.
Painting and photography operate in Gassman’s work as parallel languages bound by a single vision. Photography articulates truth directly, while painting abstracts that same truth into ambiguity and contradiction. Each medium pursues the same voice, converging on shared emotional and conceptual ground.
Recurring themes in Gassman’s work include vulnerability, self-mastery, and the shadow self—the unseen dimensions of human existence. His paintings employ typography as both structure and disruption, folding language into abstraction to materialize emotional truths while resisting closure. Working with diverse materials, he builds textured, dimensional surfaces that carry physical weight equal to their conceptual intent.
Each work unfolds as a sustained narrative—a meditation on what is spoken, what is withheld, and what persists beneath the surface. Through his visual language, Gassman positions art not as a fixed object, but as an active dialogue between memory, perception, and the unseen.
