For decades Gaylen Gerber has employed the supposedly “neutral” color gray, often making works that appear—but are in fact not—identical. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he made uniformly sized square canvases that contain almost invisible still lifes rendered in three tones, or values, of gray on gray grounds. The longer one looks, the more the underlying image emerges.

Untitled and undated, these paintings exist only in the present tense. What can seem like flat or closed surfaces are not only unexpectedly nuanced but also inclusive and ongoing. Speaking of his work at the time, Gerber remarked, “For me, what started as negation . . . came to simultaneously include its contradiction: an acceptance of the significance of everything.