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First Born | John Gurbacs | Original Oil Painting
First Born | John Gurbacs | Original Oil Painting
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Payment plans available · Ships worldwide · Certificate of Authenticity included · Contact us to discuss options
Original oil painting by John Gurbacs · Available at Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery, Tampa, Florida · Ships worldwide
A face gets split into four quadrants here, each set against its own flat color, yellow, gray, gray, yellow, and the features, one watchful eye, a heavy brow, the line of a mouth, are picked out in purple against those blocks. It's not quite an ape and not quite a man, the face sits deliberately in between, closer to a specimen under study than a portrait of either one.
That's not incidental. Set against a title as loaded as First Born, straight out of the language of Genesis, primogeniture, Adam, Cain, the ape-human face reads as the exact threshold Darwin put at the center of evolution. Cracked eggshells break in from every edge, the one image both origin stories actually share, and the painting never resolves which account it's telling. It holds evolution and Genesis in the same frame at once, unresolved, which fits Gurbacs's own stated interest in finding continuity across realms that supposedly don't touch, here turned on the oldest unresolved question there is: where humanity actually comes from.
| Artist | John Gurbacs |
| Medium | Oil on Canvas, Framed |
| Dimensions | 24 x 24 in |
| Certificate | Certificate of Authenticity included |
| Shipping | Ships worldwide with full insurance |
| Payment | Payment plans available |
Collector's Note
A piece built on real tension, not just visual but conceptual, an ape-human face and a title borrowed from Genesis, holding evolution and scripture in the same frame without picking a side.
Acquisition
Available through Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery with worldwide shipping, full insurance, and professional art packaging. Payment plans available. Private viewings by appointment in Tampa, Florida. Virtual viewings available for collectors anywhere in the world. Contact us to inquire. New to collecting? Read our collector guide →
A standard shipping rate is charged at checkout. Once your work is packed, we calculate the actual shipping cost for its size and destination. If there is a difference, we will follow up to either invoice the additional amount or refund the difference, whichever applies.
"We can see that the branches of a tree are similar in form to a bolt of lightning, or that rings of Saturn resemble the rings of water in a puddle. Yet they exist separately in time, space, and scale. There exists an order of continuity throughout the different realms."
John Gurbacs
About the Artist
John Gurbacs is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow with over fifty years of continuous practice exploring the fractal geometry hidden inside nature, the recurring patterns that connect a tree branch to a bolt of lightning, or the rings of Saturn to the rings of water in a puddle.
His process begins in the field. He photographs construction debris, tropical foliage, microscopic patterns, and underwater scenes, then builds collages until a connection reveals itself between forms and scales. From there he draws, then paints, some pieces taking months to complete.
His work sits in the permanent collections of the Tampa Museum of Art, the Leepa Rattner Museum of Art, the Polk Museum of Art, and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, along with commissions for Tampa General Hospital, Holland and Knight, Tampa Electric, and the Volusia County Courthouse. He has completed five major public murals across Florida, including the Sulphur Springs Mural, the largest of his career.
