Current
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Jane Hammond
Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Jane Hammond. This exhibition will mark the gallery's third solo exhibition with Hammond. October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026 The gallery will host an artist discussion with Hammond on... View More -
Interiors
October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026 View More -
Lucy Williams
Radiant City November 6, 2025 – January 8, 2026 View More
Past
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Nicasio Fernandez
Light Whispers August 21 – October 16, 2025 View More -
Matt Kleberg
Bless Babel August 21 – October 16, 2025 View More -
55 Years
Isn't That Long Enough? June 26 – August 14, 2025 Featuring paintings, works on paper, sculpture, film, and archival ephemera from the SFMOMA Library, and SFAI archive, this ambitious exhibition showcases museum-quality works by contemporary and historical artists, illustrating Berggruen Gallery's extensive curatorial history as well as its commitment to the development of the arts in the San Francisco Bay... View More -
Helen Berggruen
June 26 – August 14, 2025 View More -
Western Wave
Vanessa Marsh & Joni Sternbach May 1 – June 19, 2025 View More -
Isca Greenfield-Sanders
Cut From A Dream May 1 – June 19, 2025 View More -
Val Britton
Ghost Coast May 1 – June 19, 2025 Val Britton's compositions mimic and evoke the intertwining of spatial networks-cosmological, symbolic, emotional, topographic-that we inhabit at each given moment. Playing with various aerial and terrestrial perspectives, Britton's kinetic collages of cut, stained, and painted paper evoke the formal language of map-making. Yet, her shapes and forms coalesce to create... View More -
Historical Bay Area Painters
March 6 – April 24, 2025 'The current show at Berggruen’s red-bricked schoolhouse on Howard Street offers lessons from the past that could help power the city’s forward motion today.' — Tom Molanphy, 48 Hills 'This exhibition at Berggruen Gallery highlights members of the Bay Area figurative school, including Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Manuel... View More -
Chitty Figures
Curated by Barry McGee March 6 – April 24, 2025 View More -
Contemporary & Modern Masters
March 6 – April 24, 2025 View More -
Peter Halley
January 16 – February 27, 2025 View More -
Bruce Cohen
January 16 – February 27, 2025 Drawing on influences from Dutch seventeenth-century painting and Surrealism, Bruce Cohen’s oil paintings portray ethereal interior scenes constructed from amalgamations of real and invented spaces. Beginning with an observation of light, Cohen creates small color studies and graphite renderings of light and shadow before transitioning to a collaging process, where... View More -
Callum Innes
Where To Start November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025 View More -
Diana Al-Hadid
Wild Margins November 14, 2024 – January 9, 2025 View More -
Barry McGee
Old Mystified September 27 – November 7, 2024 A prominent artist to emerge from San Francisco’s Mission School, and often known by his graffiti monikers, R. Fong and P. Kin, Barry McGee's works are both in homage and conversation with the Bay Area’s urban culture. Shaped by the underground graffiti, skate, and DIY-art scene of the late 90s... View More -
Heather Day
Cut, Split, Horizon August 1 – September 19, 2024 View More -
Tom McKinley
August 1 – September 19, 2024 View More -
California Gold
June 20 – July 25, 2024 Exhibiting Artists:
Tauba Auerbach | John Baldessari | Larry Bell | Helen Berggruen | Sarah Blaustein | Katherine Boxall | Val Britton | Christopher Brown | Andy Burgess | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Adriane Colburn | Travis Collinson | Mark di Suvero | June Edmonds | Charles Gaines | Daniel Gibson | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Michael Gregory | Stephen Hannock | Sarah Hotchkiss | Seth Kaufman | Clare Kirkconnell | Matt Kleberg | Anna Kunz | Charles Lee | Barry McGee | Klea McKenna | Tom McKinley | Vanessa Marsh | Richard Misrach | Nicole Mueller | Ed Ruscha | Richard Serra | Jillian Shea | Stephanie H. Shih | Kyle Warren Smith | Joni Sternbach | Marie Thibeault | Dani Tull | Darren Waterston | Griff Williams | Jonas Wood | Christopher Woodcock View More -
Darren Waterston
A Life in Fields May 2 – June 13, 2024 View More -
Polyphonic
Minku Kim, Marie Thibeault, Nicole Mueller May 2 – June 13, 2024 Taken from the Greek, polyphony means “many sounds,” used in musicology to describe music in which two or more distinct melodies are performed synchronously. Seizing this choral term for the visual arts, Polyphonic unites three contemporary abstract artists—Minku Kim, Nicole Mueller, and Marie Thibeault—to showcase the simultaneously disparate and intersecting... View More -
Place
March 7 – April 25, 2024 In Berggruen Gallery's first group presentation of photography since 2010, twelve photographers 'catch' their scenes with impossibly good fortune. Unified by this plain but fundamental preoccupation, these photographers use place to investigate a variety of themes, from decay (Gregory Crewdson's The Mattress , Joel Sternfeld's Abandoned Freighter, Homer, Alaska, July... View More -
Paul Kremer
Straight Loops March 7 – April 25, 2024 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Straight Loops, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from March 7 through April 25, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 7, from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
In Straight Loops, Paul Kremer continues to stretch the bounds of organic form, working against strict definition in visual language or media, and towards a recognition of its inherent fluidity, especially in the abstracted form. This approach reveals the verisimilitude of visual identification between objects, thereby reconfiguring their symbolic and material relationships. Kremer’s process begins with shape rather than subject---this shape is conjured from his imagination, which is continually modeled, formed, and re-formed until Kremer is pleased with the final shape. Once setting the shape, Kremer continues applying and experimenting with color. It is only at the painting’s finish that Kremer titles his work, thus imposing a relation, and identity, onto the painted form.
An example of this occurs with the frilled white objects of Kremer’s “Mothers” series, which bear dual resemblance to a flower and an egg, allowing Kremer to underscore the maternal symbolism assigned to and shared across disparate lifeforms. In emphasizing these forms’ likeness, and identifying them as “mothers,” Kremer connects organic and graphic form with symbol, colliding maternity, biology, and geometry in a playful but poignant celebration of caregiving. Of the relationship between geometric form and his artistic development as seen in Straight Loops, Kremer writes:
“I wanted to take this opportunity to loop the new paintings in with variations of series from years past to bring it all together so people can see how I'm moving through space. I like seeing the old with the new, ideas that cycle, and with each cycle or loop, creating something new. I hope in this way, viewers can see the relationships in my work between curved and straight lines.”
Kremer’s work is underlaid by a trademark wit characterized by experimentation with form and media, as well as a diverse appreciation of art history, design, and decorative art. In particular, Kremer’s admiration for Color Field and Hard Edge painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Ron Gorchov, and Morris Louis flows through not only his works’ geometric precision, but also his intensely vibrant color palettes, which recall the saturation of technicolor film. Kremer updates these masters’ formal explorations through his background as a graphic designer, effectively merging the fine and commercial arts.
In this vein, Kremer retains a spirited humor by incorporating inventive techniques that agitate painting’s mediatic boundaries. Kremer’s experimentation with modal convention often causes his paintings to acquire sculptural or mechanical qualities, or even invite curatorial collaboration. In Straight Loops, this approach manifested in rearrangeable “sets” which can be jigsawed into unique configurations. Still, the entirety of Kremer’s artistry is united by an admiration for two-dimensional linework and flattened geometry, wherein graphic shapes are compressed over canvas or paper and demarcated with crisp, sumptuous boundaries against the negative space.
While their vivacity is visually attractive, the paintings’ flatness also creates a conceptual boundary between image and object, underscoring Kremer’s subversion of visual representation. As such, even though the artworks are flat, they acquire visual, historical, and intellectual dynamisms, working across technical and philosophical artistic approaches.
A self-taught artist, Paul Kremer was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1971, and lives and works in Houston, Texas. Before becoming a full-time artist, he owned a graphic design studio for twenty years, where he worked with clients such as Lou Reed, Tom Waits, MTV, PBS, and National Geographic. He was also a founding member of Houston-based art collective I Love You Baby, active from 1998 to 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include SPRING at Library Street Collective, Detroit; LIFE at Studio Cromie, Grottaglie, Italy; and Sets at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York. View More -
Works on Paper
March 7 – April 25, 2024 View More -
Michael Gregory
Time Present, Time Past January 11 – February 29, 2024 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
For over two decades, Michael Gregory has been interested in rural landscapes and architecture informed by road trips across the country. This fascination is dually formal and social: the artist is interested in the geometric structures of these rural buildings “punctuating” the soft, natural world, as well as these buildings’ centrality to a national myth constructed by farmers, ranchers, and “builders” in rural America. Gregory’s paintings descend from archaeological impulses rather than commemorative ones—his paintings document shifts in the American wilderness and its relationship with human intervention, rather than forwarding an outright celebration of American culture or history. Formally, the orientation of many of Gregory’s paintings might make them more accurately described as portraits for the buildings and landscapes which they depict, but they can also be understood as fictional “artifacts” exploring the germination and decay of American ways of living alongside nature’s strength and perpetuity.
Though his work is representational, Gregory takes inspiration from artists and movements across art history—he cites Bruegel, Rothko, Diebenkorn, Hopper, and the American Precisionists as influences. Gregory also uses the concept of the “sublime” from the Romantic landscape painters of the19th century. The sublime’s awe-inspiring power recalls the stasis and fluidity of time, exposing the emotional underpinnings of time’s passage. The cultural familiarity with rural structures and landscapes appeals to the viewer’s sense of nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, or return, and algos, or pain—homesickness. Despite the fact that each image is created from Gregory’s imagination, by playing on these familiar, nostalgic atmospheres, Gregory creates an equilibrium between past, present, and future, blurring temporal delineations to the degree that all points in time coalesce together. This dynamic recalls the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, from which the exhibition takes its name: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.” Gregory’s paintings suggest that the past and future are occurring alongside the present, thereby reorienting our relationship to the lands on which we live and the histories we inhabit.
Gregory was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, California. Gregory's work is included in many private and public collections, including the Boise Art Museum, Becton International Corporation, Delaware Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, Honolulu Advertiser Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, and the USEU Mission and Residence. Previously working from Bolinas, California, the artist currently lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.
Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, January 11 – February 29, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com. View More -
Abstract Perspectives
January 11 – February 29, 2024 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Abstract Perspectives, a group exhibition that highlights underrepresented voices in the world of contemporary abstract art. Abstract Perspectives will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. This curated collection furthers abstract artwork as a vital means of expression and social commentary beyond representational or stylized subject matter. While the artworks vary widely in size, media, and style, the entire show celebrates abstract art as a resistant break from convention, continually stretching the boundaries of visual language and aesthetics.
The exhibition will feature work by the following artists:
Diana al-Hadid
Tauba Auerbach
Radcliffe Bailey
Sarah Blaustein
Cecily Brown
Sarah Crowner
Heather Day
Clare Kirkconnell
Anna Kunz
Liza Lou
Julie Mehretu
Beatriz Milhazes
Odili Donald Odita
Abstract Perspectives, January 11 – February 29, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com. View More -
Architecture in Art
January 11 – February 29, 2024 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Architecture in Art, a group exhibition featuring works by Lucy Williams, Tom McKinley, and Bruce Cohen. Architecture in Art will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
This group exhibition surveys representations of architecture and interiors in contemporary art, highlighting the reciprocal influence between fine art and architecture. Hard, deliberate lines, careful considerations of perspective, and compositions of mathematical precision reign in these artworks, calling attention to the illicit impact of architecture on our lives and well-being. From sweeping depictions of luxury homes to quiet still-lifes of flora sitting alongside a tranquil window, each artwork commemorates architecture as a means of defining, reconfiguring, or preserving the worlds in which we live.
Architecture in Art, January 11 – February 29, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com. View More -
Jane Hammond
Endless Forms Most Beautiful October 19 – December 22, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Jane Hammond: Endless Forms Most Beautiful, an exhibition of new collage works. This show marks her second solo exhibition with the gallery. Jane Hammond: Endless Forms Most Beautiful will be on view from October 19 through December 22, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 19, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful showcases a series of large, expansive botanical compositions exploring the relationship between physical elements and their symbolic associations. Each botanical exists slightly outside of the realm of possibility, featuring flora and fauna from disparate continents in atypical scales and colors. Some featured species, like the Xerces Blue butterflies in San Francisco Yacht Club Trophy with Paradise Flycatcher, Nigella and Xerces Blues, are extinct, but retain historical and ecological significance to the multi-layered interactions of Hammond’s work, which can be simultaneously allusive and explicit. The compositions’ symbolic precision results from what the artist describes as descending into a “rabbit hole,” where each detail of each element is meticulously researched and expanded upon to initiate historical, environmental, and allegorical relationships between every component in the composition. These underlying attributes, often obscure or esoteric, instigate a chain reaction which physically and metaphysically tenses the work. It is from these tensions that Hammonds’ works derive their central potency, culminating in a dynamism that arrests the spectator visually and intellectually.
Hammond creates her artworks attentively but improvisationally, working off a color palette or composition which metamorphosizes as she experiments with different elements and tensions. She uses a variety of media to create each unique artwork—including hand painting, digital printing, linocutting, and assemblage—before finally fastening her combinations using a German dry adhesive and a PVA glue used in archival bookbinding. The piece is then dampened with water and leveled with flat pressure. What emerges is a flamboyant collection of flora and fauna which is at once visually stimulating and almost fantastical. This process allows the artist a vivid playfulness with color, light source, and scale as each artwork’s visual and philosophical scope ascends.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful takes its name from Charles Darwins’ Origin of Species, in which Darwins writes: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." As such, each composition celebrates life’s cyclicity and interconnectedness, highlighting ecological and symbolic relationships which exist outside of a defined place or time. Hammond’s practice thereby hinges on the balance between materiality and transcendence, resulting in beautiful works which rigorously and repeatedly challenge spectators from every angle.
Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Bridgeport, CT. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of over seventy-five museums, including the National Gallery of Art, SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Hammond currently lives and works in New York City. View More -
Michael Craig-Martin
California Dreaming October 19 – December 22, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Craig-Martin: California Dreaming , an exhibition of 14 recent paintings. This show marks his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Craig-Martin: California Dreaming will be on view from October 19 through December 22, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the... View More -
Matt Kleberg
Pigeon Holes September 14 – October 13, 2023 'One of the most talented painters working abstractly today, Matt Kleberg started taking painting lessons at age 13 and eventually turned that training into an apprenticeship, which he continued until heading off to college. Inspired by architectural moments encountered on his neighborhood walks and more adventurous travels, he makes sketches... View More -
Works in Black and White
September 14 – October 13, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Works in Black & White, a group exhibition that delves into the world of black and white as the primary, and often sole, colors. This curated collection explores the nuances of these two fundamental tones, reflecting on the various ways artists employ simplicity and complexity within this timeless palette. From bold abstractions to intricate minimalism, the exhibition reveals the artists' diverse abilities to convey emotion and provoke contemplation within the grayscale spectrum.
Works in Black & White will be on display from September 14 — October 13, 2023, featured on the top level of Berggruen Gallery.
Exhibiting Artists:
Robert Bechtle | Richard Diebenkorn | Lucian Freud | Michael Gregory | Philip Guston | Mona Hatoum | Al Held | Sarah Hotchkiss | William Kentridge | Anselm Kiefer | Matt Kleberg | Des Lawrence | Julian Lethbridge | Brice Marden | Sam Messenger | Martin Puryear | Linda Ridgway | Iran Do Espírito Santo | Richard Serra | Joel Shapiro | Kiki Smith | Jonas Wood View More -
Serial Imagery
Portfolios and Prints in Sets June 15 – July 22, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Serial Imagery: Portfolios & Prints in Sets, an exhibition of etchings and intaglios, pochoirs, lithographs, screenprints, and woodblock prints. Serial Imagery: Portfolios & Prints in Sets will be on view from June 15 through July 22, 2023. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, June 15, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Throughout history, artists have created work in series, producing collections of images, repetitive forms, and cohesive graphic languages. In the last century, the practice of creating serial prints witnessed an extraordinary surge as visionaries from the conceptual and pop art movements embraced the sequential format, propelling it to newfound prominence and cultural relevancy. This exhibition will explore the compelling methodologies in which artists employ printmaking techniques to communicate unconventional concepts and push the boundaries of their chosen medium. Whether it involves utilizing multiple prints to convey a progressive narrative or extending the subject across multiple sheets, this presentation delves into the possibilities of sequential printmaking.
The artworks showcased in Serial Imagery: Portfolios & Prints in Sets were created with a diverse range of techniques and hybrid processes, including pochoir, etching and intaglio, lithography, screenprinting, and woodcut. The exhibition is grounded by the complete sets of Henri Matisse’s groundbreaking Jazz from 1947, a portfolio of twenty colorful pochoirs from the artist’s cut-out series, and Wayne Thiebaud’s canonical Delights from 1964, a suite of seventeen intimate etchings of confections and foods. Serial Imagery presents an array of contemporary approaches to serial production, demonstrating how seminal artists engaged and experimented with the tradition of printmaking. It includes works by:
Nina Chanel Abney
Brice Marden
Odili Donald Odita
Polly Apfelbaum
Henri Matisse
Kiki Smith
John Baldessari
Julie Mehretu
Wayne Thiebaud
Charles Gaines
Robert Motherwell
Ellsworth Kelly
Terry Winters
Artist Nina Chanel Abney's CREW displays sentimental portraits of friends and fellow creatives, employing bold shapes and vibrant hues to create iconic images that celebrate the significance of collective support. In Heart and Soul, a portfolio of nine woodblock prints, Polly Apfelbaum ventures beyond her customary use of primary and secondary colors, delving into freshly imagined color combinations to create modernist heart-shaped design patterns. In Eight Soups, John Baldessari utilizes serial repetition to play with the iconic imagery of Henri Matisse’s 1912 painting, Goldfish and Sculpture, together with a nod to Andy Warhol’s ubiquitous soup can series, creating a vibrant series of eight screenprints. Serial Imagery presents a diverse range of contemporary approaches to serial print production. Whether the focus is experimenting with shifting chromatic pairings, expanding upon a conceptual narrative, or subverting historical iconography, these portfolio and print sets denote an interest in transcending disciplinary boundaries imposed by the notion of singularity.
Additionally, the exhibition celebrates the important contribution of fine printing presses and publishers in the process of creating and distributing serial prints. Each of these presses played a critical role in the serialization of the artist’s vision, from planning to execution. Prints in the exhibition were created at Crown Point Press, San Francisco; Durham Press, Durham, PA; Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles; Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley; and Tériade, Paris; among others.
Serial Imagery: Portfolios & Prints in Sets, June 15 – July 22, 2023. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com. View More -
JJ Manford
In A Western Town March 30 – April 29, 2023 View More -
Sam Messenger
Colour Veils March 30 – April 29, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Colour Veils, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Sam Messenger. This show marks his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Colour Veils will be on view from March 30 through April 29, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 30, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Sam Messenger combines repetition and unpredictability to create delicate veils that evoke the organic patterns of billowing cosmic nebulas and crystalline gossamer. Colour Veils presents twenty new works created from Messenger’s methodological use of ink and acrylic on paper or linen. The tactile dimension of Messenger’s works reflects the artist’s meticulous handling of ink and pigment on paper - a manual technique that harkens back to his early training in graphic design, technical drawing, and printing practices. These new works represent a slight departure from those previously exhibited in Messenger’s 2017 eponymous exhibition with the gallery; While his earlier work predominantly featured backgrounds of varying shades of black and grey, Colour Veils incorporates an abundance of color – ruby-toned reds, creamy taupes, shades of indigo, and a stunning injection of sky-blue bring new life to this series of veils.
In this exhibition, Messenger continues experimenting with his chosen medium's organic capabilities while deftly addressing formal considerations such as tone, contour, and structure. This new body of work has been crafted entirely through freehand techniques, eschewing the use of rulers or straight edges. After the color surface is dry, Messenger meticulously applies the line-work, made up of tiny marks which follow a generative rule, covering the surface of the work in interlocking geometric patterns. This layering process instills the works with a kinetic energy, as planes of linear repetition swell and contract to create a fluid rhythm of spherical forms with a fibrous delicacy. Messenger's hand-drawn approach allows the artist's natural touch to infuse the underlying mathematical structure with subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, producing boundless waveforms with an ethereally animate quality. This structured yet unpredictable ebb and flow imbues each individual work with a uniquely mesmerizing textural quality and visual complexity.
Titles of individual works, such as Veil for Belladonna and Veil from Aconitum, reference various flowering plants, the colors of the backgrounds and foregrounds corresponding with the hue of its bloom. In this way, Messenger highlights his works' poetic qualities while suggesting a deeper connection to the natural world. Analogous patterns of mathematical structures and growth in nature are unearthed, as allusions to the Fibonacci sequence evoke the mysterious alchemy of the cosmos. As the thin lines of Messengers’ veils swell and undulate, these gauze-like geometric structures and floral hues intertwine to coalesce into a poetic expression of abstraction.
Sam Messenger was born in London in 1980. He received his M.A. at the Royal College of Art, where he was awarded the Parallel Prize in 2005. Messenger’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as The British Museum, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. Messenger’s art is also featured in numerous public and private collections, including The British Museum, London; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. Messenger currently lives and works in London.
Colour Veils, March 30 – April 29, 2023. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com. View More -
Christopher Brown
Square Dancing February 23 – March 25, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Christopher Brown: Square Dancing, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Christopher Brown. This show marks Brown’s eighth solo exhibition at the gallery and will be on view February 23 – March 25, 2023. A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery on Thursday, February 23 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
The title of Brown’s exhibition Square Dancing is a pun, an ironic description of the artist’s playful manipulation of grids and squares that undergird a range of images from cityscapes and gingham shirts to swimming pools and pajamas. As with imagery, style in these new works varies from striped or patterned abstraction in some paintings to representative figuration and written text in others. Throughout, however, threads of light humor and expressive iconoclasm define these new paintings as dealing much more with expression and pictorial invention than straightforward depiction.
More so than in previous bodies of work, the new paintings often deal with pattern relationships, most emphatically, perhaps, in paintings of gingham shirts and one large painting of undulating, luminous green and white stripes that, at first glance, could read as a take-off on 1970’s era abstraction. But a subtle break in the pattern and a row of small horizontal buttons just below the mid-line shifts interpretation, ‘revealing’ the work as what appears to be an enormous close-up of satin pajamas. Or so it seems, both with this work and others, where patterns of rich and luminous color appear simultaneously as abstract fields and, often, ironically playful images.
Brown’s paintings have often lived in that rich zone between abstraction and figuration and in that way these new and quite different paintings seem also familiar. Their strong color sensibility, personal inventiveness, and sense of place—their specificity and invention—even in the small studies of shirt collars, define and enliven them. Yes, they are pictures, but at their heart they are paintings—embodiments of painterly inquiry, arrived at rather than planned, slightly mysterious, personal interpretations of the artist’s world.
Christopher Brown was born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in 1951. He received his B.F.A from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and his M.F.A from the University of California, Davis in 1976. He has held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California College of the Arts. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Brown has been honored with several awards since the beginning of his career, including three National Endowment for the Arts awards. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Christopher Brown: Square Dancing February 23 – March 25, 2023. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Stephanie H. Shih
Greetings from Gold Mountain February 23 – March 25, 2023 Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Greetings from Gold Mountain, an exhibition of recent ceramics by Stephanie H. Shih. This show marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Greetings from Gold Mountain will be on view from February 23 through March 25, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 23, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Stephanie H. Shih’s painted ceramic sculptures negotiate the dynamic narratives within contemporary Asian American identity. San Francisco—originally known in Chinese as 金山, or Gold Mountain—is the site of America’s oldest Chinatown, and Shih’s newest body of work chronicles its past and present through imperfect replicas of everyday items. Rendered in a medium malleable enough to yield to the artist’s touch and painted by hand, each sculpture fits into Shih’s object-based accounting of historical events and cultural touchpoints. Ultimately, it is the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects—a restaurant sign, a toy train, a dry-cleaning hanger—that creates for a narrative of America’s first Chinese enclave that’s at once playful and reflective.
Some references are easy to miss; if you didn’t know that Jeremy Lin grew up in the Bay Area, you might have missed the connection to Knicks Linsanity Cap (2012). A stack of four unrelated VHS tapes—a classic film noir, an experimental arthouse movie, a fantastical action-comedy, and a Tony Hawk skate video—are all set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Other references are more apparent; a ceramic poster of Bruce Lee’s 1973 film Enter the Dragon highlights one of the city’s most famous hometown heroes. House of Nanking (1988), 919 Kearny St. recreates the sign for a beloved local restaurant that has become a veritable landmark of the city.
As a counterpoint to these lighter nods to pop culture, other sculptures in the exhibition reference darker histories. Angel Island (Immigration Station, 1910–1940) is a hand-rendered map marking the point of entry—and interrogation, inspection, and detention—for an estimated 1,000,000 immigrants. A ceramic wire hanger titled We <3 Our Customers (Chinese Laundries, 1850) locates San Francisco as the origin of an industry born of prejudicial labor laws. The Little Engine That Could (Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869) presents the whimsical children’s book character as an allusion to the migrant labor used to build critical American infrastructure.
Shih’s broader artistic practice often explores objects that blur the line between foreign and domestic, emphasizing the layered identities of immigrants and their children. In Greetings from Gold Mountain, she uses a doilied plate of crab rangoons, a scorpion bowl complete with ceramic cocktail umbrella, and a clear bag of porcelain fortune cookies to challenge notions of supposed authenticity. While these foods were all concocted in the Bay Area—the first two having no basis in Asian cuisine at all—they have certainly become part of the lexicon of American Chinese restaurants. In this way, Shih reminds us that outside influence is an unavoidable, and even central, aspect of the diasporic experience. Confronted with the realities of colonialism, displacement, assimilation, and cultural interchange, the artist rejects the flattened identity politics that often dominate these conversations. Instead, Shih advocates for a more nuanced perspective, challenging the idea that such exacting discourse cannot be had in the public sphere.
Born in Philadelphia, Shih currently lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Portland, OR, Dallas, Boston, and Philadelphia. Shih has recently been nominated for multiple awards, including the United States Artists Fellowship, the UOVO Prize at the Brooklyn Museum, and a permanent public artwork with the City of New York. She has been awarded grants and residencies from the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Lighthouse Works, and Silver Art Projects. Shih’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Syracuse University Art Museum and New-York Historical Society.
Notably, Shih’s engagement with social issues extends beyond her craft. Since 2017, Shih has used her art and accompanying social media platform to raise over $100,000 for disenfranchised and immigrant communities facing material instability and deportation.
Greetings from Gold Mountain, February 23 – March 25, 2023. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Anna Kunz
The Tide January 12 – February 18, 2023 View More -
Her Voice
An Exhibition in Honor of Gretchen Berggruen November 10 – December 23, 2022 I am honored to present this exhibition, Her Voice, in honor of my late wife, Gretchen Berggruen. Co-owner of Berggruen Gallery, Gretchen was the heart and soul of the gallery. This group show features more than thirty artists, all of whom Gretchen championed, worked closely alongside, and deeply admired. This exhibition reflects Gretchen’s vision and her great passion in life. Those who had the pleasure to have known her know the deep level of care and attention with which she always acted. Her expertise, drive, kindness, patience, and perseverance drove the gallery to be what it is today. Gretchen was my partner and our leader, and I am proud to present Her Voice, celebrating her life and all that she built. – John Berggruen
Featuring artworks by the following artists:
Diana Al-Hadid | John Alexander | Jennifer Bartlett | Cecily Brown | Christopher Brown | Squeak Carnwath | Bruce Cohen | Roseline Delisle | Mark di Suvero | Richard Diebenkorn | Austin Eddy | Helen Frankenthaler | Jane Hammond | Stephen Hannock | Shara Hughes | William Kentridge | Clare Kirkconnell | Julian Lethbridge | Alicia McCarthy | Tom McKinley | Julie Mehretu | Elizabeth Murray | Tom Otterness | Martin Puryear | Linda Ridgway | Joel Shapiro | Judith Shea | Kiki Smith | Mark Tansey | Wayne Thiebaud | Fiona Waterstreet View More -
Tom McKinley
September 1 – October 29, 2022 View More -
Tom Otterness
September 1 – October 29, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Tom Otterness, an exhibition of sculptures by renowned New York based artist, Tom Otterness. This show marks Otterness’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view September 1 through October 1, 2022. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 8, 2022, from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Tom Otterness, an iconic American sculptor, is celebrated for his bronze figures that animate public spaces throughout the world. His career began in 1978, when he became a member of Collaborative Projects, a pioneering community of independent artists in New York City, and he has since focused much of his work on site-specific projects. Otterness’s public works are highly recognizable and widely appreciated, such as his popular 2004 multi figure sculptural installation Life Underground for New York Metropolitan Transportation at the 14th Street Union Square subway station. Otterness’s spirited creatures generate moments of pause in busy urban life, allowing each passersby experiences of levity and satire while going about their daily lives. Otterness employs the lost-wax process to create his cast metal figures, ranging from palm-sized to monumental. His characters relay witty commentary and discerning truths on social matters, human emotions, and fabled idioms. This exhibition presents a survey of Otterness’s sculptures from 1999 to 2022, including personified animals and humanoid figures, some of which simply serve to lighten the viewer’s mood with a smile, while others tackle themes of economic disparity and political injustice.
Otterness transforms bronze into comical themes and whimsical remarks on commonplace fables using his creatures as the characters—capybaras, armadillos, and cows, to name a few. The artist’s nearly life-sized bronze sculpture, Cash Cow, humorously addresses American capitalism and economics. His capybara duo plays with constructed gender identities and societal norms through their clothing and accessories—Female Capybara wears a pearl necklace and high heels, while Male Capybara wears a top hat and suit.
Otterness’s figures explore a spectrum of sentiments. Sad Sphere depicts a sorrowful or overwhelmed figure hunched over with his head held defeatedly between his hands. In Youth and Age, Otterness juxtaposes the tensions and relationships between young and old, placing the overinflated confidence of adolescence—Youth—opposing the diminutive stature of an elderly figure—Age. Overshadowed by the physical dominance of Youth, Age is bent over his cane, but simultaneously, Youth appears to crouch down to hear the wisdom of Age. This work is but one example of how Otterness uniquely comments on the human condition with specificity and wit.
Long has John Berggruen Gallery worked with and admired the art of Tom Otterness, first presenting a solo exhibition in 1987. Now, almost two decades after his last solo show with the gallery, John Berggruen is excited to work with Otterness and celebrate their enduring friendship once again.
Otterness’s sculpture has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He has had numerous solo museum exhibitions and public installations, including, Making Hay, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Tom Otterness in Grand Rapids: The Gardens to The Grand, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Tom Otterness on Broadway, from Columbus Circle to 168th Street in New York City, New York; organized by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. His work can be seen in many public collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and The Miyagi Museum of Art in Sendai, Japan. He lives and works in New York.
Tom Otterness September 1- October 1, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Clare Kirkconnell
Inside Out July 28 – August 27, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Clare Kirkconnell: Inside Out, an exhibition of recent paintings by California artist, Clare Kirkconnell. This show marks Kirkconnell’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view July 28 through August 27, 2022.
Clare Kirkconnell’s new body of work, Inside Out, is a thoughtful chronicle of the last two years in which mental and physical well-being meant navigating the new norm of sheltering in. A chapter in which morning walks brought balance to a life otherwise lived inside. Kirkconnell thinks of each painting as a journal entry, some of which chronicle joy and discovery, and others that deal with loss and an emotional state often turned inside out.
In the words of renowned poet Mary Oliver, “It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” And indeed, Kirkconnell found that the ritual of daily walks at sunrise became a time of meditation and observation, which in turn inspired the work in the studio. The dew atop a spider’s web, or the coil of a branch became cues for creation and personal reflection. Inside Out is a collection of these observations and musings, and a look at how nature enlightens and strengthens us in difficult times.
Inside Out debuts Kirkconnell’s intricate web paintings, accessing a theme of openness that prevails throughout the body of work. Utilizing her technique of stitching thread onto the flat plains of the painted canvas—as first explored in her 2019 exhibition Women’s Work—Kirkconnell weaves beads and embroidery atop oil paint, creating unique multi-medium works that simultaneously revere complexity and ease. In her exemplary work Silk and Jewels, Kirkconnell threads a glistening web over her gradient green canvas. For the artist, the webs are emblematic of portals rather than confines. Their jewel-like presence creates a symbol of an unknown, yet intriguing, liminal space. Silk and Jewels invites viewers into its netted construction and reveals its ornate stitching on the verso.
In other works, Kirkconnell explores how attending to the land creates an opening for growth and change. She revisits pruning as a theme from her early Napa Valley paintings, harnessing the practice as a metaphor for moving into a new season.
For Kirkconnell, working with textiles is an integral part of her creative process. At a young age, she was introduced to the fiber arts by the craftswomen of her family. Inside Out takes particular interest in the practice of visible mending, whereby repair and reinforcement are thought to add beauty as well as resilience. Several of Kirkconnell’s paintings include stitchwork, both actual and trompe-l’oeil, alluding to the processes of mending and healing. Mend It, Darn It is one such example in which an open sky receives a stitched patch and a visibly darned hole.
Many of the works in Inside Out chronicle personal events of the last two years. Cait’s Dahlias depicts strewn flowers, a few petals fallen loose, and a pair of scissors open at the ready. Kirkconnell shared that this piece celebrates the wedding of her son and daughter-in-law, an intimate gathering held in their backyard. A small, yet intuitive visual encapsulates a moment of joy, growth and forward momentum within the artist’s life. Another painting, Glass Mountain depicts the hill behind Kirkconnell’s studio, ravaged by fire a year ago and now in the process of mending. And yet another painting, Gretchen’s Garden, commemorates the spirit of Gretchen Berggruen, whose love of beauty, family and friendship were so perfectly illustrated in the bounty of her garden and the joy she took in sharing it. Throughout Inside Out, Kirkconnell seeks comfort in nature and presents an assemblage of works that are personal expressions of joy and loss along with healing and growth.
Clare Kirkconnell was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1955. She developed an interest in the arts early on and continued her education at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. After college, Kirkconnell spent several years as a fashion model traveling the world from bases in New York and Paris. She concurrently studied acting, landing several film and television roles, including a three-year run as the female lead in the highly acclaimed drama The Paper Chase. Never abandoning her early interest in painting, Kirkconnell then continued her studies at Santa Monica College and Otis Parsons School of Design. Her work has been consistently well-received and can be found in many significant private collections. Kirkconnell lives and works in St. Helena, California.
Clare Kirkconnell: Inside Out, July 28 - August 27, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com View More -
Linda Ridgway
A Story and the Poet July 28 – August 27, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Linda Ridgway: A Story and the Poet, an exhibition of recent sculptures and works on paper by Texas based artist, Linda Ridgway. Berggruen Gallery has worked with Ridgway for over twenty-five years and this show marks her fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. A Story and the Poet and will be on view July 28 through August 27, 2022.
Linda Ridgway is influenced by the weight of prose and how literature and nature intertwine to uncover new ideas of selfhood and material expression. Since 1987, Ridgway has been working with bronze and stretching the medium in new directions. She is well known for her intricate bronze sculptures that ascribe the enduring medium to ephemeral themes. In her 2013 Berggruen Gallery exhibition, The Grand Anonymous, she juxtaposed the material with lighter lace and crochet textures, exploring themes of domesticity and heritage. Ridgway’s new body of work, A Story and the Poet, focuses on natural themes by creating sculptures that offer an organic break for the medium. With precise lines and delicate forms, her exhibition A Story and the Poet, includes both bronze sculpture and works on paper, and celebrates the artist’s use of poetry as her muse and nature as her grounding force for self-discovery.
Ridgway draws inspiration from nature’s cyclical patterns, often referencing shapes that allude to states of growth and decay. Her sculpture Brother Line bends long and upward, grounded in a rising state of expansion, while her quieter work, Glory, suggests a melancholic leaf weathered by storm. Throughout the exhibition Ridgway looks at how sculptures can capture movement and interact with the shadows they create. Her unique bronze casting, Diagram from the River Ouse, shows a gathering of grasses fanning outward. Ridgway intricately crafts the stems of the branches creating depth and atmosphere among their shadows. Ridgway juxtaposes her medium with temporal themes, drawing on natural tropes for understanding and insight.
Ridgway’s work emerges not only from natural themes, but from a deep appreciation of poetry. In Sounds of Trees, the artist threads Robert Frost’s poems directly into the work and incorporates the poet’s writing into her literary title. For other pieces, Ridgway creates sculptural poems through a curious trail of objects. Her eponymous sculpture A Story and the Poet presents a bronze domino piece and mesh wiring held within a tangled branch. The contemporary piece asks of imaginative thought, and playful interpretation through its alluring narrative. Ridgway’s long admiration of poetry stems from her childhood memories of a strong familial passion for literature. She continues to find great inspiration and comfort from its emotive power.
At the root of Ridgway’s work is her study of lines. She is fascinated by the simplicity of groves, and the way edges structurally assemble. The exhibition presents the artists new archival pigment prints overlayed with a fine graphite grid. Ridgway uses lines to create order and harmony atop her nature-based photographs. She also looks to grasslands, commonly referencing grass as nature’s signature, to guide her drawing practice. Ridgway’s Morning Light studies, two works composed of graphic and colored pencil on paper, elegantly expose the delicate bends of branches, and the slight shimmer of morning sun. Because it was grassy and wanted wear, receiving its name from a line in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” visualizes the wildness of an untamed trail through scattered, yet controlled marks. Ridgway’s mastery of, and attention to, line reflects her desire to have her art whisper and present peace above all else. At its core, Ridgway’s A Story and the Poet is an ode to nature and all who find solace among its presence.
Linda Ridgway born in Jeffersonville, Indiana in 1947. Ridgway received an M.F.A. from Tulane University and a B.F.A. from the Louisville School of Art. Her work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions, most recently in 2021 in From First and Last Lines, To the River Ouse: Works by Linda Ridgway at the Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas and Linda Ridgway: Herself at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Other exhibitions include Art & Language: A Shared Conversation, Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas; Linda Ridgway: White Flowers, Dallas Visual Art Center, Texas, solo exhibition to recognize the 2001 Legend Award Artist; One Hundred Years: The Permanent Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2002, among others. Ridgway currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.
Linda Ridgway: A Story and the Poet, July 28 - August 27, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Summer Group Show
June 9 – July 23, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Summer Group Show. This exhibition presents a curated selection of historical and contemporary works in conversation, creating an interplay of color with intricate unions of form, texture, and movement. In Summer Group Show, the gallery is excited to highlight work by artists with both new connections, and long-standing relationships with the gallery. The exhibition illuminates original perspective and vibrancy and breathes freshness into the season and months ahead. Summer Group Show will be on view at Berggruen Gallery from June 9 through July 23, 2022. The exhibition features work by:
Polly Apfelbaum | Richard Diebenkorn | Austin Eddy | Günther Förg | Mark Fox | Matthew Feyld
Alexander Gorlizki | Al Held | Sarah Hotchkiss | Ellsworth Kelly | Matt Kleberg
Paul Kremer | Anna Kunz | Julian Lethbridge | Sol LeWitt | Alicia McCarthy
Beatriz Milhazes | JJ Miyaoka-Pakola | Sarah Morris | Margaux Ogden | Brent Wadden | Lucy Williams
Summer Group Show opens June 9, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Paul Wonner
Landscapes of Objects, 1966-2001 April 28 – June 4, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Paul Wonner: Landscapes of Objects, 1966-2001, an exhibition of works by American artist Paul Wonner. This show marks his thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Landscapes of Objects, 1966-2001, is a celebration of Wonner’s connection to Berggruen Gallery, and his work’s importance among prominent California collections. Paul Wonner’s first exhibition with Berggruen Gallery in 1978 was a presentation of his meticulous still life paintings. This show honors his legacy at the gallery and presents the opportunity to view a range of his career defining, still life oeuvre. The exhibition will be on view from April 28 through June 4, 2022.
Paul Wonner was a distinguished American painter who keenly explored the fluidity between abstraction and realism throughout his prolific career. This exhibition highlights his still life paintings and works on paper and brings together large-scale pieces from various California collections. This group of works, dating between 1966 and 2001, distinctively marks a pivotal bend in Wonner’s career: the artist’s illustrious turn towards Abstract Realism and his acclaimed landscapes of objects.
Born in Arizona in 1920, Paul Wonner received much of his art training in the Bay Area. After completing his undergraduate degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts, now CCA, in 1941 and following his service in the US Army in 1946, Wonner embarked on his professional commitment to art. He began his career in New York, at the height of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. His early work reflects the energetic brushstrokes and strong coloring characteristics of the movement. Yet, his abstracted paintings remained attentive to recognizable phenomenons and wonders—the shifting patterns of light, the evoking moods of weather, and the spatial effects of figures cast in shadow. In 1950, Wonner returned to the Bay Area to receive his Master of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. He received guidance and encouragement from artists including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff. Two defining features of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, the attention to the characterizing texture of paint and a close observation of a subject’s presence in space, resonated with Wonner, and ignited his own significant contributions to the movement.
Art Historian Caroline A. Jones recognized Paul Wonner and fellow California artists, Theophilus Brown and Nathan Oliveira, as the Bridge Generation, highlighting their continuation in the Bay Area Figurative Movement’s creative path, yet their progressive stretch of medium limits. Where some artists delved into studies of abstraction, Wonner dedicated himself to the close observation of the representational world. In his 1966/67 painting Tulip, Wonner depicts a single pink tulip in a glass vase. By reducing the composition and focusing on the flower and vase, he creates atmosphere and depth through a descending cast of blue shadows. This painting reflects the lighting and spatial structure of the Bay Area Figurative movement yet offers foresight to his ensuing attention to the still life genre.
Paul Wonner’s stylistic shift to overt still life painting in the 1970s reasserted his fascination with the parameters of realism. In Imaginary Still Life with Slice of Cheese Wonner astutely paints a series of objects, separated in space. From the lattice crust of the pie to the detailed, pictorial vase, Wonner showcases his high level of painterly skill. Yet his representational paintings have immense evocative potential. His work combines hyperrealist observation with a pervading sense of reminiscence, and story. Study with Fruit and Flowers poetically invites an audience to the pencil and paper and a playful array of objects. His staged fruit are individually presented, yet harmoniously assemble into visual performances.
Wonner masterfully constructs his landscapes of objects, creating subtle contradictions in space to keep curiosity afloat. His tabletop scenes often intersect a surface in the foreground with a firm horizon line behind. In Studio: Two Tables Popover and Coffee, Wonner creates space through shapes found among household objects; the circle of a coffee cup, the flatness of a ruler, or the length of kitchen knife. He balances structure with new inventions and twists on perspectival conformities. In his acrylic on paper, Fruit and Kitchen Towels (Green cloth), Wonner uses the sharp angles of the scene’s table to construct an unusual point of view, and a dialogue for his everyday objects.
Paul Wonner’s large-scale painting Garden Terrace presents his late career, complex still-life constructions. His 1997 painting overlaps a populated scene of garden tools, animals, and elaborate flower bouquets atop a terraced lawn. This whimsy setting asks of a wandering gaze and presents the multitude of dimensions found within Wonner’s work. Landscapes of Objects, 1966-2001, highlights these lively scenes, the breadth of the artist’s imagination, and his works prominence within the story of Bay Area art.
Paul Wonner was a distinguished artist and major museums throughout the United States have collected his work. He had numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 1981, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling retrospective of his work entitled Paul Wonner: Abstract Realist. Paul Wonner's work is represented in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, also in Washington D.C. Paul Wonner passed away in 2008 in San Francisco.
Paul Wonner: Landscapes of Objects, 1966-2001, April 28 – June 4, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Drawing with Scissors
Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse's Jazz March 10 – April 23, 2022 “By creating these colored, paper cut-outs, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come. I don't think that I have ever found such balance as I have in creating these paper cut-outs. But I know that it will only be much later that people will realize to what extent the work I am doing today is in step with the future.” — Henri Matisse, 1951
Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz, a group exhibition inspired by the monumental set of twenty pochoir prints by French artist Henri Matisse. Drawing with Scissors will be on view at Berggruen Gallery from March 10 through April 16, 2022. The exhibition features work by:
Polly Apfelbaum | John Baldessari | Bruce Cohen | Sarah Crowner | Richard Diebenkorn | Austin Eddy
Helen Frankenthaler | David Hockney | Ellsworth Kelly | Paul Kremer | Anna Kunz | JJ Manford
Henri Matisse | Beatriz Milhazes | Robert Motherwell | Kelly Ording | Muzae Sesay
Mickalene Thomas | Jonas Wood
Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz recognizes Matisse’s 1947 groundbreaking series Jazz and its formal and spirited connection to works by contemporary artists. During the post-war era, while battling personal illness, Matisse turned his isolation into creative liberation. While limited in mobility and struggling to paint and sculpt, he began exploring collage and the stencil process, pochoir. Using gouache, Matisse coated sheets of paper with paint, allowed them to dry for tactile texture, then cut and arranged the sheet into intricate shapes and forms. Matisse famously described this process as “drawing with scissors” linking “line with color, contour with the surface.” His chromatic collage series, Jazz, later made into a print series, is full of songful figuration, themes of performance, and a lively blend of hopefulness and unease. Through collage, Jazz combines a vibrant array of colors and forms and has been of great inspiration to contemporary artists. Jazz is a triumph of mixed media and artistic vitality and Drawing with Scissors celebrates its legacy and the continued discourse it elicits in the present day.
Matisse’s cut-outs, also known as découpés, paved the way for new explorations in material and structural composition. Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes creates multilayered, vibrant works that bloom with intricacy and layered construction. Yogurt is a geometric assemblage of mixed media on paper. Milhazes notes her direct influence from Matisse’s collage works; “When I think about Matisse’s cut-outs, I think about a painter working with collage. [His compositions] a construction of colors and beauty.”[i] Sarah Crowner’s stitched canvases also push beyond medium constraints. Her sewn segments recall the inventiveness of Matisse’s cut-outs, yet her shapes, while nodding to Matisse’s, are uniquely her own. Austin Eddy creates his own collage style with paint, adjoining color and motif. Pigeon in the park, explores the space found upon a painted surface, culling texture, and patterns to reinterpret representation.
Where some artists explore Matisse’s collage technique, others respond to the artist’s fluidity of form and elegant use of color and line. Drawing with Scissors brings together distinguished drawings, collages, and prints by Ellsworth Kelly. Like Matisse, Kelly focused on the depths of simplicity. Untitled (Red/Blue) juxtaposes colors in search of balance; a reoccurring theme throughout Matisse’s découpés.
Houston based artist Paul Kremer, in a recent painting titled Cradle 01, responds to Matisse’s collage work. His buoyant shapes and colors emanate possibility and evoke the ease of Matisse’s creations in captivating motion. Kremer shares:
Matisse’s careful choreographing of palettes, his ability to convey a distinctive feeling with bold objects on flat planes of color, and the relentless positivity that emerges from his work have all been an inspiration to me. His color combinations are incomparably beautiful and surprising. And given all that was going on in his life, especially at the time of the cutouts, it’s wonderful that he made paintings feel the way they do. [ii]
Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler took to Matisse’s intuitive approach to color. For Matisse, color was an expression of the senses, and his découpés brought opportunity for new, smaller-scaled study. Frankenthaler’s painting Center Break and Motherwell’s Berggruen Series lithographs consider color, its expressive power, and its influence over us. Contemporary painter Anna Kunz responds to color in a similar, intuitive manner. She shares:
Matisse once remarked about his approach to painting being “studied carelessness”. This resonates with me because it regards the body’s knowing and the trusting of one’s intuition through practice. When I approach the canvas, I’ve got my studying done, so I can invite informed spontaneity to keep the works direct and fresh.[iii]
Other artists rejoice and react to Jazz’s gestural forms and movements. Matisse’s famed Icarus print, plate 8 in Jazz, presents an animated figure falling against a blue, sky background. Artist Mickalene Thomas draws interest and reference to Matisse’s representations of the female form. Her Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires calls attention to how cut-outs present reductive portraits, narrowing the gaze onto the subject. Working within the collage medium, Thomas reacts to fragmented representations found within canonical works like Jazz.
Matisse’s cut-outs appear within contemporary still life painting as well, enlivening interior spaces. Realist painter, Bruce Cohen, paints Matisse’s cuts-outs directly into his work, often represented beside windows suggesting the openness and depth they exude. John Baldessari’s Eight Soups appropriates Matisse’s 1912 painting, Goldfish and Sculpture, while adding his own characteristic humor and semiotic commentary. In his sublime composition, JJ Manford’s painting, Sunrise with Matisse, highlights a lively wall of cut-outs. In his own words, Manford expresses his inspiration from Matisse:
His paintings and collages retain a sense of the fun and spontaneity that went into making them; they never appear arduous or overly labored, remain both heavy and light. This is a sense that I also want to convey with my own paintings.[iv]
Drawing with Scissors additionally presents Matisse’s delicate line drawings, and their lasting influence for contemporary artists. Drawing was a central exercise for Matisse; he noted, “my line drawings are the purest and most direct translation of my emotion.”[v] This exhibition displays the intricacies of Matisse’s drawing collection, from figural expressions to still life observations. Matisse’s Nu Couché portrays the beauty of the artist’s drawing craft. He outlines the form of a woman with effortless detail and ease. Renowned artists Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Diebenkorn, and David Hockney have incorporated drawing into their own practices. Ellsworth Kelly’s delicate botanical surveys quietly depict his close observation to the shapes around him. Richard Diebenkorn’s charcoal on paper, Untitled 1963-64, recalls Nu Couché with its with mirroring simplicity and elegant demeanor. Hockney’s lithograph Black Tulips presents a singular still life, highlighting a grounded essence to his cross-medium work.
Drawing with Scissors honors Matisse’s relation to the Berggruen family. In 1953, John Berggruen’s father, Heinz Berggruen, exhibited Henri Matisse, papiers découpés, at his gallery in Paris. The presentation was the very first exhibition devoted to the cut-outs. The exhibition featured eighteen works and was widely received. Upon reflection, Heinz wrote: ‘In my opinion, the cut-outs, which verge on abstract art, have something magical about them; it is hard to say exactly what it is. Their language is profoundly lyrical, and, at the same time, monumental.”[vi]
At its core, Drawing with Scissors is a celebration of creative possibility. For Matisse, his cut-out process offered a novel conversion of artistic innovation and formal inspiration on matters of color and form. His découpés opened doors to new modes of expression for a challenging moment in his own life. Jazz is of great inspiration for contemporary artists and exudes Matisse’s long sense of curiosity and creativity.
Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz, March 10 – April 16, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
♡ Thiebaud
Memorial Exhibition February 3 – March 5, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is honored to present ♡ Thiebaud, a memorial exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and prints to celebrate the life and legacy of American artist, Wayne Thiebaud. This show marks the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of Thiebaud’s work since his first exhibition at John Berggruen Gallery in 1973. ♡ Thiebaud will be on view beginning on February 3, 2022, shown on Berggruen Gallery’s second floor.
♡ Thiebaud is a commemoration of Wayne Thiebaud’s life and a celebration of his immeasurable relationship with Berggruen Gallery. In 1968, John Berggruen encountered a group of small etchings from Thiebaud’s famous 1964 Delights series. Over fifty years later, Thiebaud’s luminous paintings and works on paper have become integral to the gallery’s history and have been widely exhibited, shared, and admired. To coincide with the gallery’s 50th anniversary, Berggruen Gallery had the great fortune of celebrating Thiebaud’s 100th birthday with a retrospective of his work, showcasing the artist’s quintessential still life paintings, steep and winding cityscapes, and saturated expanses of the Sacramento Valley. Beyond the artist’s oeuvre and prolific career, Wayne Thiebaud was a long-time friend to John and Gretchen Berggruen and held a meaningful connection with the Berggruen Family. This exhibition of thirty works shares delightful pieces from the Berggruen’s collection, many of which hold sentimental value and have rarely been exhibited together in a gallery setting. In addition, the exhibition highlights the artist’s charming meditations on the elegance of everyday stages: the patterns found atop a deli counter, the spiral and color of candy, and the casted shadows of a row of palm trees. ♡ Thiebaud is a celebration of the artist, his generous spirit, and his life led with creativity. Thank you, Wayne Thiebaud; Berggruen Gallery is left with deep gratitude and wonderment.
In his memory we are honored to share a personal note from John Berggruen:
Throughout my career, there has been perhaps no other human being that has exemplified so many wonderful qualities as Wayne Thiebaud. He was an extraordinary artist, of course, but he was equally the most articulate teacher, lecturer, and to those that were privileged to have experienced this unique quality, a masterful joke-teller!
He was a wealth of information, and he had a manner of so eloquently sharing his extraordinary insights into the many art historical influences on his oeuvre, from impressionism onwards. In conversation, or in more formal lectures, he would refer to other artists that had a strong baring on his career, yet he had a manner of so humbly discussing his own work.
Another highlight in my experience knowing Wayne was the number of memorable dinners we shared together with our families, and in my athletic youth, we also shared a great number of animated tennis matches!
This commemorative exhibition encompasses several works that my late wife Gretchen and I loved and lived with for many years. Collecting and exhibiting these works has become a lifelong passion of mine. I hope that this exhibition captures the spirit of Wayne’s charm, generosity, optimism, and the virtuosity of his craft. We will miss him dearly.
— John Berggruen
Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920. His family moved to Los Angeles shortly after his birth. From a young age, Thiebaud showed interest in pursuing an artistic career. As high school student, the aspiring artist had a summer apprenticeship with Walt Disney Studios’ animation department. Following his graduation from high school, Thiebaud worked between New York and California as a cartoonist and designer. During World War II, Thiebaud served in the Air Force’s Special Services Department as a cartoonist, then in the First Motion Picture Unit. After the war, Thiebaud attended California State University at Sacramento, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A year in New York City in 1956, in which he befriended Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg, pushed him to explore new styles and come to the realization that he was not interested in the kind of Abstract Expressionist work that then dominated Manhattan. Thiebaud received his first solo exhibition from the Crocker Art Gallery (now the Crocker Art Museum) in Sacramento in 1951. Always a teacher, Thiebaud lectured at Sacramento City College and in 1959 became a beloved professor at the University of California, Davis, where he taught until his retirement in 1991. Today, Thiebaud’s work is represented in many significant museum collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Thiebaud is also the recipient of numerous, prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Arts awarded by President Bill Clinton (1994) and the American Academy of Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2001). Wayne Thiebaud passed away in his home in Sacramento in December 2021. He was 101.
♡ Thiebaud, opens February 3, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Peter Saul
San Francisco January 13 – March 5, 2022 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Peter Saul: San Francisco, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by American artist Peter Saul. This show marks Saul’s first exhibition with the gallery. The presentation will be on view from January 13 through February 26, 2022. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, January 20, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Peter Saul, whose exciting and turbulent visions of American culture have shocked viewers for nearly sixty years, was born and raised in San Francisco. The city and its environs have appeared frequently and consistently in Saul’s work, both as subject and as context, or background. This exhibition in his hometown represents a kind of homecoming for the artist and assembles a major group of works that depict the city of San Francisco, including five monumental paintings, four works on board, and two related prints. The works cover a wide, 30-year period of Saul’s production, and range in date from 1966 to 1996. The works reflect Saul’s stylistic and conceptual development as an artist, and similarly trace the evolution of San Francisco as both an urban location and an idea in the collective conscience. Moreover, they constitute a history of Saul’s relationship with the city, as it developed from the city of his youth to the subject matter of his mature work. Indeed, in addition to works that depict San Francisco and its landmarks, the exhibition also considers the city’s recognition of and support for Saul’s practice: the presentation will feature Still Life #1 (1996), which the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have generously loaned to the exhibition.
Two monumental paintings and a related work on paper—View of San Francisco (1979), View of SF/Red Plane (1985), on loan from the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and San Francisco (1986)—take San Francisco’s urban landscape as their primary subject. Saul has made five monumental works on canvas that depict San Francisco, one of which is held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In describing this series, Saul has said:
The idea behind [these pictures] was to combine the art style of Abstract Expressionism with the San Francisco earthquake. The earthquake did actually happen, in 1906, and another big one will certainly happen again within the next 10,000 years, whereas the art style only happened once, after WWII. In the art style, the artist flings around paint, here, there, or where it looks good. In the earthquake things get shaken up — the Golden Gate Bridge could end up on top of the building. So I loosened up my thinking and put things I could remember from growing up in San Francisco in the wrong place, which certainly made the picture more fun to look at.
What motivated [these pictures] and a number of others I’ve painted is an almost complete lack of humor in “Modern Art” since WWII. Where are the jokes? Even if it’s wrong, I prefer to add something that wasn’t there before to doing the same old thing, even if it’s highly praised. [1]
These paintings equate an art style with the natural phenomena of an earthquake, and feature Saul’s signature style that references cartooning and technical mastery/facility.
An earlier group of works from 1969 address the idea of San Francisco in our cultural imaginary, along with many of the sociopolitical events that contributed to or constituted that idea. Both on the ground and in the media, San Francisco was a lightning rod for conversations around race, gender, socioeconomic inequality, and injustice. Saul’s paintings from this year, including Self-Defense, animate these tensions in a visually extreme manner. Self-Defense features a member of the Black Panthers defending herself against a pair of lecherous white police officers, whose distended forms reach across a caricatured version of the Golden Gate Bridge, the trusses of which are labelled “Rich Shit” and “Poor Shit.” Porting a gold hoop earring and a natural hairdo that reads “Panthers,” the central figure holds a comically scaled pocketknife labelled “self-defense.” Along with Frenchin’ in Frisco and Frisco, Self-Defense illustrates Saul’s position at the forefront of the counterculture, a spot from which he produced paintings that addressed many of the most pressing questions of the day.
A final group of works on board, along with a set of related prints, date from 1966 to 1968. Saul produced these works immediately upon his return to the Bay Area, following six years living and working in western Europe. A pair of works on board from 1966 evidence Saul’s early style, notable for its use of ballpoint pen and colored pencil and incorporate the Golden Gate Bridge as a compositional device to link a diverse set of topics. For instance, a neoclassical building labeled “Bank of China” supports one of the bridge’s trusses, which itself supports a roadway that leads toward a drawing of the earth labeled “Upper Class.” These thought-maps of interconnected symbols testify to the continued importance of Saul’s madcap vision and align his creative abandon with the aesthetic uniqueness of San Francisco. Indeed, Saul’s rebellious pictures continue to evade categorization—a position well known to a city celebrated for its iconoclasm.
Peter Saul was born in 1934 in San Francisco, California. He attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now San Francisco Art Institute), and the Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis. Saul’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo presentations, including recent exhibitions at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; les Abattoirs, Toulouse; the Deichtorhallen Hamburg; the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York; and the Fondation Salomon Art Contemporain, Annecy. Saul’s work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions at institutions both stateside and abroad, including recent presentations at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Met Breuer, New York; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln; Kunsthalle Emden; the New York Academy of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. His work is held in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Peter Saul lives and works in New York City and upstate New York.
Peter Saul: San Francisco, January 13 – February 26, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Venus Over Manhattan, New York. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Isca Greenfield-Sanders
Let's Be Still November 18 – December 23, 2021 View More -
Odili Donald Odita
Climate Change October 14 – November 13, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Odili Donald Odita: Climate Change, an exhibition of recent paintings by Nigerian American artist Odili Donald Odita. This show marks Odita’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from October 14 through November 13, 2021. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 14, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter who employs shape and color to explore personal, historical, and socio-political landscapes. Born in Enugu, Nigeria, and raised in Columbus, Ohio, the artist is inspired by his cultural identities and the contrasts they present. He is well known for his large-scale works that interlock complex geometries with distinct and vibrant colors. Odita weaves together formal expressions rooted in Modernism and African textile patterning to questions of personal identity and societal meaning-making. Through the freedom of abstraction, Odita creates a visual language to explore the myriad of complexities the world faces today.
Odita’s forms go beyond the predictable. The striking diagonals and slants that bisect his canvases break through classic abstract perspectives and create their own distinct, visual landscapes. The artist often establishes balance through a strong central dividing line, then subtly disrupts any steadiness by making edged and unexpected spaces. For Climate Change, Odita directs his attention towards the imminent natural tensions our world faces today and recognizes a conversation of extremes and dualities that extends beyond weather patterns. In his eponymous painting Climate Change, he expresses volatility through a series of uneven vertical patterning and jagged lines that push beyond the canvas. The bold color segments simultaneously meet and diverge, creating a perspectival painting that is both in motion and static. Noticeably striking, the painting forebodes a sense of complexity, threat, and longing for hope and creates a strong visual space worthy of critical contemplation.
For Odita, color is an agent for the senses. He is intuitive in his color selections and chooses them carefully, with design, to express thought and emotion. The artist is acutely aware of physiological responses associated with different hues and thinks critically about the assumed associations a color may hold. With this awareness, Odita deliberately hand mixes his paints and notes, “I cannot make a color twice – it can only appear to be the same – this is important to me because it highlights the specificity of differences that exist in the world of people and things.’’ In Climate Change, Odita chose colors that contain both lightness and darkness within them, expressing the nuances of light present in every tone.
In addition to Odita’s striking canvas works, Climate Change exhibits the artist’s newer practice of using wood-panel supports for his paintings, rather than exclusively canvas. Odita questions how materials impact our perceptions of what is natural and what is created. The triangular shapes in The Secret blend with the wood paneling surface, leveling the acrylic with the natural grain. In Burning, Odita keenly elevates the extremes of the burnt orange color by painting on wood panel, and placing the subject matter of the work in dialogue with its materiality. Throughout Climate Change, the artist employs abstraction to unpack binary thinking and understand the interconnectedness of our state of being. Odita’s practice works within complexity, bridging materials and temperaments to create room for new expanses to arise.
Odita was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1966. He earned his Bachelor of Arts with Distinction from Ohio State University in 1988 and his Masters of Fine Arts from Bennington College in 1990. Odita has exhibited widely in museums and institutions, both nationally and internationally, including Savannah College of Art and Design; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, and Princeton University Art Museum, NJ. His installations are on view throughout the country and in 2007, his installation Give Me Shelter was featured prominently in the 52nd Venice Biennale exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind curated by Robert Storr. His work belongs to numerous museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Odita lives and works in Philadelphia.
Odili Donald Odita: Climate Change, October 14 – November 13, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Paul Kremer
UV September 9 – October 9, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Paul Kremer / UV, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist, Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from September 9 through October 9, 2021. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 9, from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Kremer, best known for his abstract paintings of simplified forms in bold yet minimalistic colors, frequently paints hard edge shapes with precise lines and angles. In his newest body of work, the artist has focused on decidedly more organic shapes, those reminiscent of blooming flowers and animals in motion, objects that evoke pleasure and contentment in the artist. UV, at its heart, is Kremer’s exploration of hopefulness and ebullience through color and shape during a time in the world when everything can feel difficult and complex. While discussing this new work, the artist shared, “I want to make paintings that make me feel better. When I stand in front of them, I want to feel for a moment that life is less stressful, less chaotic. I want to stir curiosity by the simplest means and add some positivity while I’m alive.” Kremer’s playfully refined works challenge viewers to see delight and expansive movement through autonomous forms and color.
Kremer explores this sentiment of positivity through a process that bridges digital experimentation and physical materiality. In this most recent body of work, he began by creating hundreds of drawings, settling on forms that evoke feelings of harmony and curiosity within him. After refining his shapes, Kremer tests varying color combinations until he finds engaging connections that aesthetically balance. Finally, Kremer renders his shapes onto the physical canvas giving them physical expression.
The shapes that Kremer captures on his canvases in UV are not abstractions in the classical, deductive sense, but are expansive in their scope. In titling the works, the artist chose words that double as verbs and nouns, allowing his shapes to simultaneously be in perpetual motion and representatives of entities or acts. For example, in Drift, the brisk, windy movement, captured in a chilled white against cobalt blue, appears to be sweeping by on the canvas, while its momentum also resembles a lone brushed hilltop freshly laid with snow. Similarly, the lofty winged movement in Flight suggests a soaring bird traveling through the sky, and visually describes a suspended mid-air journey with the mirrored forms of vermillion and Prussian blue. Kremer plays with verbs and nouns to unite movement and definition and widen the perception of meaning to form.
In addition to Kremer’s vibrant and bold paintings, consisting of uniquely mixed color creations, UV debuts the artist’s “ghost works.” The gray curving lines that circulate these softer pieces suggest the outline of a colored work yet further single out an ascribed movement. Where Dock in its colored form might suggest the mooring of two complementary colors, Dock (Ghost) accentuates an anchorage of two shapes becoming one.
Throughout this new body of work, titled UV, Kremer observed that he had repeatedly captured shapes that resemble the letters U and V. These forms frequently appear in nature and throughout our lives, from the curve of a bird’s wings while in flight to the crook of a tree limb branching from its trunk, these contouring expressions beam with life. Kremer adds, “If we stand with our legs and arms outstretched, we become these forms.”
A self-taught artist, Paul Kremer was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1971, and lives and works in Houston, Texas. Before becoming a full-time artist, he owned a graphic design studio for twenty years, where he worked with such clients as Lou Reed, Tom Waits, MTV, PBS, and National Geographic. He was also a founding member of the art collective I Love You Baby, active from 1998 to 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include Windows at Louis/Buhl & Co., Detroit; Hovering at Maruani Mercier, Knokke, Belgium; Layer Hooks at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York.
Paul Kremer / UV, September 9 – October 9, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
John Alexander
New Paintings and Drawings August 11 – September 12, 2021 View More -
Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre
55 Main Street, East Hampton, NY July 9 – August 8, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre, a two-person exhibition featuring recent work by both artists. The show will be on view at Berggruen Gallery, East Hampton from July 9 through August 8, 2021.
Julian Lethbridge’s paintings expand his exploration into the medium’s limits of hue, pattern, and tactility. The artist begins by creating a grid for his canvases—a preliminary guide that informs the initial composition. Lethbridge moves on to build layer upon layer of oil paint, often emphasizing his undulating patterns with pigment sticks. Finally, the artist utilizes thin metal bands to incise the impasto he has formed. Both additive and subtractive, the paintings have surprising optical depths and a unique rhythmic sensation. The result is methodical and refined, yet impulsive and lyrical.
Carl Andre helped define the Conceptual and Minimalist art movements of the late 20th century. Andre’s work on view offers unique insight into the artist’s smaller-scale makings. His arrangements remain elementary, featuring factory-cut wood, Styrofoam, aluminum, and steel. The modular compositions are not symbolic or figurative, but rather real objects as honest as the surrounding gallery floors or walls. This raw simplicity is achieved through focus on the basic properties of matter—form, weight, and structure. The sculptures included in the exhibition, each standing below six inches tall, offer a more intimate and visceral entry into the artist’s oeuvre.
Altogether, Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre presents the recent work of two contemporary artists who both lean on mathematics and geometry to invent abstract, minimalist makings. Andre’s rudimentary sculptures and Lethbridge’s monochrome paintings complement one another—mutually revealing the simple yet profound truths of shape, color, and form.
Julian Lethbridge was born in Sri Lanka in 1947 and moved to England shortly thereafter. The artist would go onto study at Westchester College and Cambridge University (1960-1969). He presented his first exhibition of paintings and drawings in 1988 and continued to have one-person shows across thew country, from New York City to San Francisco. Today, Lethbridge’s work has been exhibited globally and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The artist currently lives and works in New York.
Carl Andre was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1935. Andre studied at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1951 to 1953, where he was introduced to Hollis Frampton and Frank Stella—two artist that would become influential to Andre’s career. Andre has had many significant retrospectives of his work, including those held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England. His work is in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London, among others. Andre lives and works in New York, NY.
Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre, July 9 – August 8, 2021. On view at 55 Main Street, East Hampton, NY 11937. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery directly by email info@berggruen.com or by phone (415) 781-4629. View More -
Lucy Williams
MOSAIC May 20 – July 3, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Lucy Williams: MOSAIC, an exhibition of recent mixed media bas-relief collages by British artist Lucy Williams. This show marks Williams’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view May 20 through July 3, 2021.
Lucy Williams explores the graphic concerns of shape, color, and repetition through an architectural lens in her most recent collages. From renderings of Bauhaus era Modernist interiors to playful interpretations of 19th century Welsh quilt patterns, MOSAIC presents intricate works both representational and abstract. Employing a meticulous practice that reinterprets the very medium of collage, Williams builds her work in ascending layers of varying materials. Paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread are just a few of the components Williams manipulates to structure her architectural geometries. The artist writes, “the illusion that I aim to achieve is an image that is simultaneously industrial and tactile.” The stark subject matter is depicted using hobbyist materials; its initial coolness gives way to an intricate warmth of detail.
MOSAIC explores the geometries of public and private swimming pools—from community Olympic-size municipal pools in Germany to luxurious private pools in Palm Springs. The element of reflection in the water inevitably distorts the perception of built architectural form. Blue Tiles (2021), Indoor Pool (with mural) (2021), and Reflecting Pool (red mosaic) (2019) are representational depictions of the German swimming complexes of Schwimmhalle Finckensteinallee, Südbad Dortmund, and Hallenbad Brackel, respectively. At each of these sites, and in Williams’s corresponding works, intricate tile patterned mosaics and elaborate geometric murals cover the walls. The pools reflect the walls back on themselves, doubling up their forms and colors from an altered angle of perspective. Through a layered use of paper, paint, and Plexiglas, Williams also depicts the geometry of the tiles below the water. This latticework of collaged depth and surface describes an image that is entirely believable and yet surprisingly abstract, as the two properties are combined. Other architectures—a library or an entire apartment block—are included in the exhibition as earlier points of contrast to Williams’s pool imagery, though these too rely on repeated shapes of color to construct their subject matter. Altogether, the artist’s works stand as relics of these past places, as the real structures that have inspired Williams have often been demolished, redesigned, or drastically modified. Moreover, the artist’s own unique practice of laborious, three-dimensional collage infuses the austere scenes with newfound humanity.
In addition to Williams’s mid-20th century architectural renderings, MOSAIC also debuts the artist’s first-ever purely abstract works, the Threaded Collages. These intimate-scale works are at once simple and complex. Williams utilizes triangular and diamond forms in repetition, both in colorful painted papers and the exposed panel where such papers are absent, to create dynamic designs. Adding contrast of fibrous line to the flat planes of paper and panel, the forms are then joined and elaborated with parallel stiches of silk and cotton threads. Williams notes, “my interest in repetition of graphic shapes in the representational works—the tiled pool floor, the mosaiced wall, the blocks of color and texture—is magnified in the threaded collages.” Rather than a wholly separate body of work, these collages exist as an extension of Williams practice. She originally conceived the inspiration for her abstract works upon exploring Bauhaus tapestries, such as those made by Gunta Stölzl and Benita Koch-Otte. This research led her to come across a quilt sample made in Otti Berger’s weaving workshop. Williams became enamored by the piece and soon transformed an experimental painted collage into a woven one. Considering her Welsh ancestry, Williams went on to explore 19th century Welsh quilting. She found these textiles reflected the distinct, bold graphics of her own makings. Soon, her abstract works took on a more playful and personal quality that resonated with the process of transformation occurring throughout the rest of her practice.
Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England in 1972. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 1996 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. The artist has since exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows including Pavilion at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2012), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014) and Lucy Williams: Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Williams’s work has also been represented in major group exhibitions, such as Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019). Williams currently lives and works in London
Lucy Williams: MOSAIC, May 20 – July 3, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email. View More -
Berggruen Gallery in East Hampton
55 Main Street East Hampton, NY 11937 May 14 – September 12, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition space in East Hampton for the 2021 summer season. The gallery space is located in the heart of East Hampton Village at 55 Main Street. Berggruen Gallery’s special "pop-up" will be on view May 14 — September 30, 2021. Hours: Monday-Wednesday, by appointment; Thursday-Sunday, 11am-5pm.
John Berggruen first opened his eponymous gallery in downtown San Francisco in the spring of 1970. Five decades later, the gallery has executed more than 800 major exhibitions, participated in significant domestic and international art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, and exhibited at the Art Dealer's Association of America's The Art Show, since the fair's inception, for the past 33 years. A cornerstone of the West Coast art world, Berggruen Gallery is proud to deepen our roots on both coasts of the country with this exciting East Coast venture.
Berggruen Gallery will present a curated selection of Modern and Contemporary paintings, sculptures, and limited-edition prints. The presentation will reflect the gallery’s ongoing dedication to juxtaposing historical works with those from the contemporary canon. The gallery will feature a dynamic and diverse group of internationally-acclaimed artists, including renowned Post-War American painters like Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, and Wayne Thiebaud, as well as many important contemporary artists artists such as Diana Al-Hadid, John Currin, Beatriz Milhazes, Odili Donald Odita, and Jonas Wood. Berggruen Gallery is excited to present a unique breadth of work—transcending subject matter, composition, medium, and technique—for the summer of 2021 in East Hampton.
Artists
Diana Al-Hadid | John Alexander | Stephan Balkenhol | Christopher Brown | Bruce Cohen
Michael Craig-Martin | John Currin | Richard Diebenkorn | Helen Frankenthaler
Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Stephen Hannock | Jasper Johns | Paul Kremer | Alicia McCarthy
Tom McKinley | Beatriz Milhazes | Odili Donald Odita | David Park | Joel Shapiro
Wayne Thiebaud | Stanley Whitney | Lucy Williams | Donald Roller Wilson | Jonas Wood View More -
Richard Diebenkorn
Paintings and Works on Paper, 1948-1992 February 18 – April 30, 2021 View More -
Michael Gregory
The Best Days Are the First to Flee January 14 – February 13, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee, an exhibition of eighteen recent paintings by California artist Michael Gregory. This show marks Gregory’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 14 – February 13, 2021.
Michael Gregory’s most recent body of work presents a series of new oil paintings that render the vast, captivating, and almost ineffable beauty of the American landscape—a subject matter that has always fascinated the artist. Gregory writes, “America has always been an idea, a construct of our imagination, and our imagination has outdistanced even its vast boundaries and empty places. The American West has provided us a rich metaphor for a discussion of our hopes, aspirations and failures. It is the subject of literature, poetry, and song—part of our American common language.” Gregory’s landscapes, rich in detail, continue to expand this great American metaphor.
Though Gregory usually paints the American West, Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee traverses from New York’s Hudson River Valley to America’s Heartland to California’s Bay Area. Gregory has lived and worked in Bolinas, California for many years, but has recently built a studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. This most recent body of work is a result of the westward, cross-country road trip Gregory took from his New York home back to Bolinas in 2020. The journey provided Gregory with an expanded visual vocabulary of American landscapes and buildings. Once returned to his studio, Gregory reimagines these places onto canvas. While some scenes are actual, most are amalgams from memory. The paintings ultimately become odes to fictional locations that we still recognize as real places. In the end, Gregory provides his viewer with a special glimpse into an American experience—one of space, travel, loneliness, vicissitudes of fortune, and great beauty.
In 29 BCE, Virgil published a poem titled Georgics which disseminated the dual importance and tension bound up in agrarian life. The opening line reads “Optima dies prima fugit,” meaning “the best days are the first to flee.” Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee features eighteen new oil paintings depicting the artist’s signature barns and silos situated against broad plains, juts of rock greeting still river bends, and abandoned homes set against dramatic cloudscapes. Influenced by the Hudson River School, Gregory continues the tradition of prolific American landscape painting by imbuing his scenes with a luminous, transcendent quality. Yet Gregory also renews the movement with the inclusion of buildings, barns, granaries, or houses. The structures reflect, even pay homage to, the people who built, lived, worked, or left them. These individuals or communities are not painted into the picture, but their presence is palpable. We are left with scenes simultaneously remote, mysterious, and familiarly intimate.
Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. Gregory is represented in numerous, prestigious public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The U.S. Trust Company in New York, Microsoft Corporation, General Mills Corporation, Bank of America, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Gregory’s work has also been exhibited at major museums across the country, including The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; The Hunter Museum of Art, Tennessee; and The Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio. Gregory currently lives and works in Bolinas, California.
Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee, January 14 – February 13, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Open by appointment. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Bruce Cohen
December 3, 2020 – January 9, 2021 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Cohen 2020, an exhibition of recent paintings by California artist Bruce Cohen. This show marks Cohen’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view December 3, 2020 through January 9, 2021.
Bruce Cohen’s most recent body of work presents a series of captivating interiors. Each composition contains an element of ethereal intrigue, whether it be a floral bouquet perched beside a seemingly boundless window view or a Piet Mondrian painting cast in the geometric shadow of another object. Fastidiously organized yet whimsically conceived, the scenes do not exist in reality but are instead invented from the artist’s own imagination. Cohen produced many of his most recent paintings while in quarantine—this period of global isolation leading the artist to explore the passage of time in a domestic setting more acutely than ever before.
Influenced by Dutch still life painting and Surrealism, Cohen orchestrates his compositions to feel simultaneously representational and completely dreamlike. Cohen cites René Magritte as his first inspiration as a young painter and has held the Belgian Surrealist as an enduring influence ever since. Reflecting on his former student’s fascination with the movement, Paul Wonner wrote of Cohen’s work in 1999, “I feel sometimes that I am looking at a place where some tremendous, mystical event has just take place. The people concerned have just moved on out of sight, but there remains on the scene the residue of a magic moment.” Over two decades later, Bruce Cohen continues to surprise his viewer with this kind of transformation, transcending our domestic realities.
Bruce Cohen 2020 features a selection of oil paintings from 2017-2020. Depicting quotidian objects amidst unreal settings, Cohen employs his distinct, hard-edge style. The artist will juxtapose varying elements within a single canvas to extenuate the inferred movement of space, light, and time. A foregrounded bowl of fruit sits for the viewer against a vast and unknown portal of sky, both elements hinting at what kind of world lay outside the painting’s rendered realm. The artist increases this tension by playing with color—including both saturated and muted hues—and with light—including both sun streaks and dewy shadows. Overall, the scenes become both familiar and otherworldly.
Bruce Cohen was born in Santa Monica, California in 1953 and continues to live and work in Southern California. He studied at UCLA and UC Berkeley before earning his BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1975. Cohen is represented in numerous, prestigious public and private collections, including that of Phillip Morris, New York; Pacific Bell, Los Angeles; the San Diego Museum of Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Bruce Cohen 2020, December 3, 2020 – January 9, 2021. Due to the current climate, we will not be hosting a public opening reception at this time. Please contact us to schedule an appointment to view the exhibition. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Wayne Thiebaud
October 16 – November 28, 2020 View More -
Alicia McCarthy
September 3 – October 9, 2020 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Alicia McCarthy, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Oakland-based artist Alicia McCarthy. This show marks McCarthy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view September 3 through October 9, 2020. Click here to enter the digital viewing room dedicated to the exhibition.
Alicia McCarthy’s most recent body of work presents the breadth and dynamism of the artist’s entire oeuvre, centering the myriad motifs she takes as subject matter, from her signature weaves to helices, rainbows, spectrums, and negative weaves. McCarthy’s patterns function with duplicity; while direct and honest, her compositions are also layered with complex, sociological suggestions. In describing her practice, McCarthy explains that she “never uses paint out of a tube,” instead mixing each unique hue to ultimately “stand for individuality and how things work together.”[1] In this way, McCarthy’s artistic practice focalizes around developing a more intense color consciousness in her viewer.
McCarthy’s work is emphatically structured, yet her panels often boast glimpses of spontaneity and intimacy. The latter is revealed through the distinctive presence of the artist’s hand, whether that be through her paint drips, doodles, handwriting, or fingerprints. These marks serve as subtle “autographs” in which the artist pervades her otherwise formal patterning with an acutely personal awareness. Her intentional use of common material enhances this oscillation between formality and familiarity. Often using found wood, wall space, or office paper as canvas, McCarthy embraces the everyday properties of material to offer a base for her progressively precise compositions.
Extending beyond the artist’s iconic weave motif, Alicia McCarthy includes paintings and works on paper that analyze new geometries. While McCarthy’s rainbows and spectrums explore color radiation, her helices and negative weaves disrupt structural boundaries. Yet no matter the rendered pattern, McCarthy's work reveals increasing intricacy. When McCarthy’s lines become grids and grids become weaves and weaves become entirely mesmerizing patterns, a certain push-and-pull between the singularity of individual mark-making and the holistic nature of the entire image becomes clear.
Alicia McCarthy was born in Oakland, California in 1969. She received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and her M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. McCarthy is considered and integral and pioneering member of the Mission School, an art movement that originated in San Francisco’s Mission district in the 1990s. Strongly influenced by mural, graffiti, comic, cartoon, and folk art aesthetics, Mission School artists drew inspiration from their surrounding urban environment. Today, McCarthy has exhibited important solo exhibitions all over the globe and is in the permanent collections of many major institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Oakland Museum of California, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City. Shehas also received numerous distinctions, honors, and awards, including the Artadia Award for San Francisco in 2013 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Art Award in 2017. Alicia McCarthy currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Alicia McCarthy, September 3 – October 9, 2020. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Contemporary Women Artists
September 3 – October 9, 2020 We are pleased to present Contemporary Women Artists, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by eight of the most exciting female artists creating work today, including Tauba Auerbach, Carmen Herrera, Clare Kirkconnell, Suzanne McClelland, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Linda Ridgway, and Kiki Smith. This show will be on view through October 9, 2020.
Contemporary Women Artists presents a compelling selection of works by women artists who have each pioneered facets of the contemporary art canon. While Milhazes fuses cultural elements from her native Brazil with influence from European Modernist painters, Mehretu completely reenergizes and renews 21st century Abstraction. Altogether, the works composing Contemporary Women Artists are intricate yet bold; delicate yet powerful.
Spanning an intriguing breadth of subject matter, Contemporary Women Artists showcases works that both allude to and subvert mainstream ideas of femininity. Kirkconnell, Ridgway, and Smith consider the natural world in their alluring renderings while Auerbach and Herrera compose works of rigid geometries. When viewed altogether, power between delicacy and boldness is shared. The viewer can appreciate how strength radiates from seemingly fragile, natural forms while a certain subtlety can be found in the linear components of abstract works.
Contemporary Women Artists, September 3 – October 9, 2020. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
OBJECTively Speaking
Contemporary Sculpture July 27 – October 10, 2020 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present OBJECTively Speaking: Contemporary Sculpture, a powerful survey of forms that transcend notions of material, line, volume, and balance. This exhibition will be on view July 27 - October 9, 2020. You can view the exhibition in person by scheduling an appointment here. For a virtually interactive exhibition experience, we invite you to visit our online viewing room here.
We are also excited to announce the introduction of Berggruen Gallery 3D viewing experiences, a new feature that we are inaugurating with our current OBJECTively Speaking: Contemporary Sculpture exhibition.
OBJECTively Speaking brings together distinct processes from a dynamic range of artists while simultaneously meditating on the Minimalist art movement. The artists present in this showing have all worked to both continue and disrupt notions of sculpture as we understand it, even having influenced one another’s work in real-time. While Joel Shapiro’s geometric abstractions speak to Donald Judd’s unadorned objects, Anish Kapoor’s exploration of reflectivity acknowledges Joseph Kosuth’s unique use of light and medium 45 years prior. Examining the influence of Minimalist, Installation, Abstract, and Conceptual sculpture in the 20th and 21st centuries, OBJECTively Speaking presents a complex yet complimentary selection of works by:
Mark di Suvero
Antony Gormley
Mona Hatoum
Donald Judd
Anish Kapoor
Joseph Kosuth
Ritsue Mishima
Iran Do Espirito Santo
Joel Shapiro
Frank Stella
OBJECTively Speaking: Contemporary Sculpture, July 27 - October 9, 2020. On view by appointment only at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. To schedule an appointment, please click here. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Contemporary Paintings
June 22 – August 29, 2020 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Paintings, an extensive exploration of light, color, and composition through the medium of paint. This exhibition will be on view June 22 - August 2020. You can view a selection of paintings from the exhibition through our ADAA viewing room here, or view the exhibition in person by scheduling an appointment here. For a more interactive view of the exhibition, we invite you to visit our virtual viewing room here.
From an exquisite example of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light series to the colorful environments of local, Bay Area painters Muzae Sesay and Jenny Sharaf, Contemporary Paintings abounds with saturated hues, graphic geometries, and varying techniques. Whether it be whimsical abstraction or meticulous realism, the paintings juxtapose one another to open dialogues regarding how artists render their surrounding world. The exhibition inaugurates the gallery’s reopening and summer programming, reflecting Berggruen Gallery's ongoing dedication to presenting exhibitions that bring together works from the contemporary canon and of historical significance. Furthermore, the show features a dynamic and diverse group of artists from several different countries, from the United States to South Korea to the United Kingdom, including works by:
Enrique Martinez Celaya
Mary Corse
Sarah Crowner
Austin Eddy
Matthew Feyld
Mark Fox
Shara Hughes
Matthew Day Jackson
Minku Kim
Paul Kremer
Des Lawrence
Julian Lethbridge
Sam Messenger
Odili Donald Odita
Clare Rojas
Sean Scully
Muzae Sesay
Jenny Sharaf
Contemporary Paintings, June 22 – August, 2020. On view by appointment only at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. To schedule an appointment, please click here. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Richard Serra
Works on Paper February 20 – April 4, 2020 View More -
John Alexander
Landscape and Memory January 9 – February 15, 2020 View More -
Mark di Suvero
Sculpture January 9 – February 15, 2020 View More -
Donald Roller Wilson
December 1 – 23, 2019 Berggruen Gallery is proud to present selected paintings from 1977-2014 by Donald Roller Wilson as a part of the artist's eponymous exhibition with the gallery, on view for the month of December 2019.
Donald Roller Wilson was born in Houston, Texas and currently lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Roller Wilson is a Gothic storyteller with the phenomenal technique and precision of an old master, animating his paintings with finely wrought clothed chimpanzees, dogs, and cats, wooden matches, dill pickles, asparagus stalks, olives, and cigarette butts. He creates characters like Cookie the Baby Orangutan, Jane the Pug Girl, Jack the Jack Russell "Terror," Loretta the Actress Cat, Miss Dog America, and Patricia the Seeing Eye Dog of Houston. Each character springs from the artist's hyper-vivid imagination into lengthy caption fantasies and onto canvases that require an enormous amount of time to complete, all painted in vivid detail, reminiscent of the 16th century Dutch masters. Roller Wilson's recognizable works hang in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum, New York, New York; Bank of America, San Francisco, CA; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden- Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. View More -
Helen Frankenthaler
Paintings September 26 – December 7, 2019 View More -
Major Contemporary Works
May 16 – August 31, 2019 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Major Contemporary Works, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by important contemporary artists. This show will be on view May 16 - July 6, 2019.
Tauba Auerbach | Cecily Brown | Christo | Tony Cragg | Sarah Crowner | John Currin | Mark di Suvero
Spencer Finch | Günther Förg | Danny Fox | Michelle Grabner | Shara Hughes | William Kentridge
Alicia McCarthy | Beatriz Milhazes | Sarah Morris | Odili Donald Odita | Tom Otterness
Martin Puryear | Joel Shapiro | Jenny Sharaf | Kiki Smith | Lucy Williams
Major Contemporary Works, May 16 - July 6, 2019. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Danny Fox
Some Mornings Catch a Wraith March 27 – May 11, 2019 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Danny Fox: Some Mornings Catch a Wraith, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Los Angeles-based, British artist, Danny Fox. This show marks Fox’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view March 27 through May 4, 2019. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Wednesday, March 27 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Danny Fox’s most recent body of work presents a vibrant collection of figures – both real and imagined – that comprise a poetic narrative of the artist’s surrounding environment coupled with observations of contemporary life. Fox’s portraits exude an insightful sense of atmosphere and temperament as they probe intimate moments of humanity, while the artist’s own fragile moments of heartache, remorse, and revelation infuse the work with a raw spectrum of emotion that translates to a compelling artistic range. Fox coalesces these moments with a myriad of rich cultural and historical references: Greek mythology, a captain in the French Foreign Legion, Puritan history. Compelling imagery such as a soldier on horseback or a single figure at a bar proposes a contemporary translation of cultural iconography, thus subtly evoking in the art object an enveloping passage of time.
Fox, a self-taught artist, often discovers artistic sources outside his studio in downtown Los Angeles. The site-specific nature of his work not only influences their backdrops and palettes, for the streets and sites he continually encounters also signify what Fox describes as “a wider dimensional landscape, something more spiritual.” Characters drawn from urban life shape a narrative that is at once familiar yet obscure, personal yet vague. Throughout this body of work, Fox references his time spent at the Hotel Figueroa – a historic Los Angeles site newly renovated as part of the city’s transforming downtown landscape. Characters observed within and around the hotel – guest, bartender, night porter, chef – shape a narrative rooted in the artist’s moments of grief, solitude, and contemplation as he both witnesses and engages with the environment around him. An intimacy exists in his portrayal of these figures, while an aura of mystery invites the viewer to ponder the relationship between artist and subject. The relationship is not always apparent, yet the portraits’ titles often imply an identity: Unwanted Guest, The Night Porter, ‘The Bartender. Others are more complex, albeit more personal – To Turn Rotten In The Mind Of A Lover, ‘Til Death Do Us Part – alluding to love and loss, the pain of separation.
Fox’s acrylic and pen compositions feature delineated areas of color and a flattening of spatial depth that recall the rich color studies and bold compositional force of early modernists such as Henri Matisse. In particular, while producing these works Fox closely studied the electric palette of Vincent Van Gogh’s Asylum Garden at Arles (1889). Throughout this body of work, contrasting areas of pure color, textural brushwork, and expressive geometric patterns create an animated pictorial space that blurs the line between representation and abstraction, foreground and background, real and imagined. Subtly embedded throughout the works are poignant non-figurative elements – horses, moons, foliage, a martini glass – that lend the art an anecdotal curiosity. Meanwhile, abstracted figures reveal spatial incongruities and vibrant, non-representational colors that often fuse with the surrounding space, yet their austere expressions and enigmatic body language imbue the works with a complex emotional depth that is raw and provoking, even confrontational. Grounded in personal memory, Fox’s works thus explore the boundaries between pictorial modes while embracing moments of human experience.
The introspective nature of Fox’s work is perhaps most intimately revealed in the artist’s paintings of himself, one of which features a serpent weaving through the picture “challenging (his) head every move, casting a shadow over every moment,” as Fox describes. He writes, “It’s a self-portrait, drinking wine alone at a table, nothing more to say.” This self-reflexive essence is subtly embedded throughout the body of work, as several paintings reference Fox’s past work in the background. In response to such references, Fox remarks, “I wanted to show what I left behind, I wanted to show you what you weren’t looking at and to acknowledge how I got into this room they call ‘success.’”
Danny Fox was born in St. Ives of Cornwall, England in 1986. His work has been the focus of numerous exhibitions at international galleries, including the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; v1 Gallery, Copenhagen; S/2 Sotheby’s, Los Angeles and New York; and the Redfern Gallery, London. Additionally, Fox was the 2017 artist in residence of the Porthmeor Artist Residency Programme. Fox has also been featured in numerous publications, including GQ Magazine, Vice, Galerie Magazine, Interview Magazine, and BLOUIN ARTINFO. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles and London.
Danny Fox: Some Mornings Catch a Wraith, March 27 – May 4, 2019. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.
A book of poems, paintings and sculptures by Danny Fox, published by Tarmac Press, accompanies the exhibition. For more information or to purchase, please click here. View More -
Selected Contemporary Paintings and Works on Paper
February 28 – May 11, 2019 View More -
Diana Al-Hadid
Temperamental Nature January 14 – February 23, 2019 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Diana Al-Hadid, an exhibition of panels, sculptures, and bronzes by Syrian-born, New York-based sculptor, Diana Al-Hadid. This show marks Al Hadid’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 14 through February 16, 2019. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 17 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
In this exhibition, Al-Hadid explores the material potential of the art object through an investigation of the laws of physics. Undulating, seemingly weightless fragments form a complex dimensionality that is at once fractured and complete, fragile and solid, antiquated and contemporary. The exhibition - which includes sculptural wall pieces, freestanding sculptures, and bronzes - reveals Al Hadid’s use of industrial materials to form a narrative grounded in the artist’s unique process-based study combined with her myriad sources from history and memory to science and literature. This particular body of work – dense with references from art of the past– reveals the unique contextual foundation of Al-Hadid’s artistic practice. Straddling past and present, her work prompts a consideration of the art object’s material history. A timeworn quality exudes from her work to embody a collection of modern relics – relics that express the act of artistic creation and the evocative language of painting and sculpture. The identity of the art objects thus derives from the passing of time through artistic gesture.
In Al-Hadid’s sculptural panels, she experiments with time, matter, and space to conceive gossamer labyrinths that appear capricious and transformable in their tangled layers and delicate fluidity, while these works simultaneously probe the boundary between painting and sculpture. Intricately layered compositions express a tactile sense of depth, where natural inconsistencies and organic imperfections express the artist’s rigorous manual process. Al-Hadid calls upon Northern Renaissance paintings as source material for these works, allowing their atmospheric sense of drama and whimsy to instill her panels with a sense of movement and life. Primarily landscapes, these compositions reveal strong horizontal movement, drawing the eye across each panel to create an illusion of panoramic space. Reference images from Renaissance masters such as Johan Christian Dahl, Joseph Michael Gandy, and Herri Met De Bles provide a foundation from which Al Hadid shapes her own narrative – a heavily material narrative steeped in formal examinations of scale and depth.
Al-Hadid’s freestanding sculptures and bronzes similarly pay homage to the imagery and mythology of Renaissance works. Contemporizing an ancient medium and bringing traditional motifs to life, Al-Hadid reveals how the identity of an art object is not merely defined by representation but rather artistic gesture, indicating the passage of time both through references to the past and through the artist’s material investigation of physical and pictorial space. View More -
Clare Kirkconnell
Women's Work January 10 – February 23, 2019 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Clare Kirkconnell: Women’s Work, an exhibition of paintings by Bay Area artist, Clare Kirkconnell. This show marks Kirkconnell’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 10 through February 16, 2019. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 17 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Kirkconnell’s recent body of work emphasizes the artist’s love of craft coupled with her exploration of female creativity and the feminine political voice throughout history. She writes, “My current work is focused on where we, as women, find ourselves today. Simultaneously, it is a form of tribute to the women who have brought us this far.” Kirkconnell pays homage to these women through a series of paintings that are steeped in traditionally recognized “feminine” forms of craft while referencing culturally perceived notions of female beauty. Her work thus promotes the female voice by contemporizing traditional crafts while proudly emphasizing a personal and universal history of feminine creativity, political activism, and civic engagement – both then and now.
Kirkconnell’s grandmother, a consummate craftswoman, instilled in the artist a love of craft that becomes the foundation of Kirkconnell’s recent body of work. Years of knitting, sewing, crocheting, quilting, and weaving come to life throughout the paintings to create a coalescence of art forms, whereas Kirkconnell’s works feature elements of textile and fiber arts, such as strong compositional grids, cross-stitching, and textural details.
Beyond their aesthetic principles, Kirkconnell’s references to stitchery prompt a consideration of the historical narratives surrounding women’s craft and political activism. The artist writes, “Throughout history, women have used stitchery to voice their opinions and make records. Early samplers and quilts often contained clues about their makers and the political and cultural conditions in which they lived.” In particular, Kirkconnell recalls handkerchief “journals” made by imprisoned suffragettes. As women were allowed to embroider while imprisoned, they channeled their creativity to record their experiences, noting who had been jailed and the terms of their sentences. Kirkconnell writes, “The guards wrongly assumed that as long as their prisoners were doing ‘women’s work,’ their passivity was assured. Little did they know that these small, delicate handkerchiefs would become significant historical records.” Kirkconnell reveals a connection between these historical objects of female activism and contemporary avenues of female creativity surrounding the Me Too movement. In particular, the artist recalls the Pussyhat Project, which has become a powerful force of female activism while continuing the historical and political roots of women’s stitchery.
As a former model and actress, Kirkconnell’s early career instilled in her an acute awareness of perceptions of women as objects of desire. Expectations and opinions of female beauty in these industries - often linked to sexual desire and erotic undertones - are embedded throughout Kirkconnell’s most recent body of work. Referencing key words and catch phrases, the artist uses specific examples such as the provocative captions of beauty products to propose a consideration of the existing associations surrounding female beauty. By bringing to light these pervasive perceptions through traditional forms of women’s craft, Kirkconnell’s work contemporizes the ever-powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political undertones of female creativity, thus prompting a reverence and appreciation for female artists in the face of today’s political climate.
Clare Kirkconnell was born in Brownsville, Texas in 1955. She developed an interest in the arts early on and continued her education at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. After college, Kirkconnell spent several years as a fashion model traveling the world from bases in New York and Paris. She concurrently studied acting, landing several film and television roles, including a three-year run as the female lead in the highly acclaimed drama The Paper Chase. Never abandoning her early interest in painting, Kirkconnell then continued her studies at Santa Monica College and Otis Parsons School of Design. Her work has been consistently well-received and can be found in many significant private collections. Kirkconnell lives and works in St. Helena, California.
Clare Kirkconnell: Women’s Work, January 10 – February 16, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Alexander Gorlizki
Together, Forever, For Now November 29 – December 24, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Alexander Gorlizki: Together, Forever, For Now, an exhibition of recent works on paper, sculpture and design by New York City-based artist Alexander Gorlizki. This show marks Gorlizki’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view November 29 through December 24, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 29 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Gorlizki’s works on paper, upon one’s first cursory glance, appear to be highly detailed and ornamental Indian miniatures, made with undeniably extraordinary skill. After passing one’s eyes over the works briefly, one’s head snaps back in realization that what appeared to be traditionally-attired princes sitting atop horses in intricately patterned courtly surroundings, are in fact amalgamized creations, part man, part lion or finch or elephant, riding on the back of a pigeon or rhinoceros or seal patterned with tiger print in an imaginary world of Gorlizki’s own making. He utilizes textile patterns from Japan and Malaysia, photographs of Hollywood darlings, Hindu spiritual imagery, illustrated Victorian handbooks, and cosmological diagrams, each recontextualized and combined to create a new narrative. The traditional is in fact the whimsical, the absurd, a world of the fantastic where nothing is as it appears. Scale is abandoned in favor of intrigue. History is set aside to give way to the unexpected, a delightful pastiche of seemingly incongruous objects and patterns from different times, places and fields that juxtapose and combine together to envisage a witty world of the imagination that is simultaneously celebratory and subversive. Gorlizki is inspired by a myriad of sources, including Eastern and Western, historical and contemporary, artistic and everyday. Each work, filled to overflowing with infinitesimally precise details, invites one to get close and examine it and appreciate not only the humor and irony of the people, creatures, places and patterns depicted, but also the immensely talented abilities of the human hand that rendered the work itself.
Having discovered a love of Indian Miniature painting, but wanting to use it toward his ends, in 1996, Gorlizki established a studio in Jaipur, India with the master miniaturist painter Riyaz Uddin. Uddin and the other artists in his atelier, each with his own expertise, are renowned for painting with a single-hair-tipped brush in the 600-year-old Mughal miniature style. Gorlizki himself focuses on the conceptual, imaginative and formal aspect of the image, which he draws onto antique or distressed papers and photographs. He then passes each sheet off to the miniaturists, who apply the pigments and gold leaf. Gorlizki adapts and working side by side in the studio or shipping images back and forth between New York and Jaipur, the paintings evolve layer by layer, often over a period of years. In this way, each work is a collaboration, a trans-global dialogue between artists that results in a richness that spans time and space to create something uniquely of our time.
While rich and complex enough to constitute Gorlizki’s entire artistic output, the artist’s creativity is not limited to the two-dimensional. Alexander Gorlizki: Together, Forever, For Now will highlight a selection of Gorlizki’s sculptural works. In these small sculptures, whether painted wood, cast brass, marble or found object, Gorlizki further articulates his narrative, questioning perception. These intriguing and playful sculptures pull Gorlizki’s subjects from his two-dimensional painted miniatures into the viewer’s space, allowing one to interact with the subject as an object itself. Gorlizki’s sense of humor is blatant and infectious when one examines his amorphic and whimsical sculptures, from his ornamentally and brightly painted wooden pieces that twist and turn in space to the small brass monsters, each with his or her own name–Bev, Gus, Mel and Ned. The meticulous patterning of these miniature paintings, too, is brought to life, as one wall in the gallery is wallpapered with Gorlizki’s design, a complex pattern of black, white and gray. It is when Gorlizki’s body of work is seen collectively–the works on paper beside the sculptures in front of the walls festooned with the artist’s own wallpaper–that one is truly able to appreciate the witty, ironic, subversive and playful world, truly manifold, that Gorlizki imagines and it is within this world that one is encouraged and prompted, to reexamine one’s own perception.
Alexander Gorlizki was born in London in 1967. He received his B.A. from Bristol Polytechnic and his M.F.A. in sculpture from the Slade School, London, U.K. His work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Collection Antoine de Galbert, Paris; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, CA, the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Germany; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne, Germany; Pink City Studio, Beyond Malabra Gallery, Kochi, India; Variable Dimensions, Crow Collection, Dallas. Recent group exhibitions include “living a dream…” alexander gorlizki / magic makings / gugging artists, Galerie Gugging, Maria Gugging, Austria; Washington 186, Aeroplastics, Brussels; Thinking Tantra, The Drawing Room, London (traveled). Gorlizki lives and works in New York.
Alexander Gorlizki: Together, Forever, For Now, November 29 – December 24, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Julian Lethbridge
November 29 – December 24, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Julian Lethbridge, an exhibition of twelve recent paintings by New York-based painter Julian Lethbridge. This show marks Lethbridge’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view November 29 through December 24, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 29 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Julian Lethbridge’s recent body of work probes the limits of depth, pattern, and rhythm translated through the formal elements of his medium: paint. Undulating patterns draw the eye across the canvas, creating a fluid sense of movement and flux, while thick impasto brushstrokes form a rippling surface texture that brings the medium to life. A symphony of curvilinear shapes forms intricate patterns that lend the canvas a tactile sense of depth, while the density achieved by successive layers of paint establishes a dynamic interplay of continuous geometry that is at once tumultuous and calm, impulsive and precise. This harmony of opposites lends Lethbridge’s work a visual spontaneity grounded in the artist’s controlled handling of color, tone, and spatial depth. The paint exudes an energetic dimensionality that recalls the dynamic mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, yet the intricate, lace-like patterns are subtle in their optical vibrations.
To create this body of work, the artist demonstrates the signature process he has expanded and refined since the 1980s. Lethbridge relies on a loose grid to create the foundation of the painting’s composition before building up the surface with pigment and paint. He first employs narrow brushes – an inch or two wide – to create a myriad of layers combining both oil paints and pigment sticks. To finish, using thin metal bands Lethbridge then incises these layers of pigment to create each work’s sinuous textural pattern. These repetitive forms pay homage to the artist’s disciplined approach to compositional structure, yet the underlying grid is liberated and loosened by the painterly color passages and textural surfaces that activate meditative relationships between movement and light.
This exhibition demonstrates the artist’s elegantly expanding palette. Painterly brushstrokes form rich, built up surfaces enhanced with vibrant applications of color echoed uniformly across the canvas, as Lethbridge subtly infuses his minimalist palette of black, white, and gray with energetic suffusions of color including warm hues of red, purple, blue, and pink. What emerges from this artistic process is the harmonious cadence of multiplying forms juxtaposed with the impulsive gesture of the artist’s hand, thus proposing a strong interplay between painterly and precise, unruly and composed. To view Lethbridge’s recent body of work is to expand one’s perception of painterly abstraction, further emphasizing the artist’s iconic style as a hallmark of contemporary painting.
Born in Sri Lanka in 1947 and brought up primarily in England, Julian Lethbridge received his education at Winchester College and Cambridge University. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art , New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. In 1988, Julian Lethbridge was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He lives and works in New York.
Julian Lethbridge, November 29 – December 24, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Mary McCartney
The White Horse October 18 – November 21, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present THE WHITE HORSE, an exhibition by photographer Mary McCartney featuring selections from her largest body of work to date. The exhibition will be on view October 18 through November 21, 2018. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, October 18, from 5:00 to 8:00pm.
THE WHITE HORSE pays tribute to the extraordinary beauty of one particular white stallion, McCartney's Alejandro, depicting him in the landscape of Sussex, where McCartney grew up. Using a medium-format camera for formal portraits as well as 35mm, she profiles equestrian life both on and off the saddle during the course of a year.
McCartney's intimate pictures convey the special relationship between horse and rider and underline the profound connection that binds people to these majestic animals. The viewer is taken through an ever-changing vista of lush green meadows, dappled forest trails, and nighttime forests, often using the unique perspective of a mounted rider to afford us the most compelling views.
THE WHITE HORSE is for equestrians and art lovers alike. McCartney’s beautiful and bold images are sure to evoke the magic of horses’ companionship.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the publication of THE WHITE HORSE, Rizzoli New York, 2018. Copies of McCartney's book will be available for purchase at the gallery, and there will be a book signing with the artist during the opening on Thursday, October 18.
In his poignant introduction to the publication, McCartney’s husband, film director and writer Simon Aboud shares that Alejandro, in many ways, represents McCartney in these photographs. Free from a prying eye, the works convey a sense of freedom and potential, depict moments of joyous solitude and moments shared with her family. “Alejandro becomes our guide to a journey of a young girl to a confident woman, of a landscape full of memories to a dreamscape full of the imagination and the promise of things to come,” says Aboud.
Mary McCartney (b. 1969, London) is an acclaimed British photographer whose work focuses on intimate portraiture and candid reportage. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including British Style Observed (National History Museum, London, 2008); From Where I Stand (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2010); and Mother Daughter(Gagosian, New York, 2015), a collection of photographs exploring her relationship with her mother, Linda McCartney. View More -
Isca Greenfield-Sanders
Inherited Landscape October 18 – November 21, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Inherited Landscape, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders. This show marks Greenfield-Sanders’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view October 18 through November 21, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 18 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Inherited Landscape features new oil paintings and watercolors depicting the American landscape as experienced by the artist through found amateur photography from the 1950s and 1960s. For the last 20 years, Greenfield-Sanders’ elegant and beautifully composed paintings have combined photography with watercolor and oil to create artworks that speak about “how memories are approximations, stories that we shape and re-tell.” Often executed with multiple studies, her layered paintings are constructed in a manner similar to the way human memory is built, through repeated reciting of a chosen narrative.
Inherited Landscape features a number of paintings, such as Tree Tunnel and Day Hike, that rely heavily on the play of light on leaves in natural settings, while the artist continues to explore outdoor scenes of bathers, beach combers, and beyond. She writes, “Uniting the disparate images, which came to me from many different sources, was a matter of selecting a palate and achieved primarily in watercolor.” The inclusion of figures grounds these compositions in the human experience, yet the scale of the setting to the figure shifts the emphasis away from human drama and instead highlights the monumentality of the landscape.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders (b. 1978, New York) holds a dual degree in mathematics and visual arts from Brown University. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including a solo museum exhibition in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Greenfield-Sanders’s work is in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the USA Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Estée Lauder Corporation, New York, NY; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has been the subject of articles in several publications, including Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. View More -
Nathan Oliveira
A Survey, 1959-2010 September 6 – October 13, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Nathan Oliveira: A Survey, 1959-2010, an exhibition of paintings, watercolors, monotypes, and sculptures by Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira. This show marks the gallery’s thirteenth solo exhibition of Oliveira’s work since his first show at Berggruen in 1979. The exhibition will be on view September 6 through October 13, 2018. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, September 6 from 5:00 to 8:00pm.
Spanning over a half-century, this exhibition highlights Oliveira’s iconic work from the late 1950s through his final years. The evolution of his artistic practice exists in his myriad subjects and styles across a range of media, yet an inherent sense of raw emotion and complexity unites his body of work to express Oliveira’s unique translation of the world around him. Highly influenced and inspired by artists that proceeded him, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin, Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Max Beckmann, his passion was “for continuing an inner-directed artistic tradition attached to the human subject. His art represents a response to artists, both past and present, an ongoing dialogue with artists […]” (Selz, 2002). Olivera’s work is part of the continuum, a response to and interpretation of the past, as well as a place for the next generation from which to spring.
Oliveira does not follow a disciplined approach to painting or drawing but rather explores the spectrum of pure emotion and beauty achieved by artistic gesture. The physical act of creation is emphasized through textural compositions imbued with a sense of energy and motion, allowing expressive brushstrokes to bring to life a human figure, an animal, or a place (or “site,” as Oliveira calls it). The content and style of his work thus becomes a vehicle by which one can establish an intimate connection to the art object, as a certain tension between representation and abstraction incites emotional engagement and contemplation. The psychological probing of Oliveira’s work derives from the artist’s dynamic engagement with both his medium and his subject, for he does not merely create a representation but rather crafts an intimate moment between the viewer and the art object itself.
Thick, textured brushstrokes, volumetric pools of paint, deliberate and emotive color and jagged undulations of metal form a body of work grounded in an enigmatic evocation of raw and complex beauty, while vacant, decontextualized backgrounds invite the viewer to enter an otherworldly atmosphere outside of discernable space and time. As this exhibition demonstrates, embedded throughout Oliveira’s artistic output during these years is a probing of relationships between humanity, animals, and place–subjects continually reworked and reimagined to create a vision of life that is at once timeless and futuristic, capturing a universal figure or place, or as Oliveira relates it in an interview with Richard Whittaker in 2005, “[…] a perpetual, ongoing identity that is fundamental, and we are simply part of that.” While no single idiom nor style defines his artistic practice, at the heart of Oliveira’s painting and drawing is a powerful interplay of representation and abstraction. His graceful balance between the two tinges his body of work with a theatrical bravura that remains simultaneously elegant and formal, what Steven A. Nash describes as, “his own visual dramaturgy, blending expressionism and figuration, sensitive humanistic themes and urgent formal means,” resulting in a unique yet fundamentally human artistic vision.
Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California in 1928 to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts, or CCAC) in Oakland, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland. After two years in the U.S. Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting in 1955 at CCAC and drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute, or SFAI). In 1959 Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the groundbreaking exhibition, New Images of Man, which included established artists such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since then he held numerous guest teaching appointments at various art schools and universities. He held a tenured teaching position at Stanford University from 1964 until he retired in 1995. During his career, surveys of his work were held at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles (1963); Oakland Museum of California (1973); California State University, Long Beach (1980); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1984); California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (1997); and the San Jose Museum of Art (2002). Oliveira was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and has received many other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two honorary doctorates, and, in 2000, membership in a distinguished order conferred by the government of Portugal. His work is collected nationally and is held in the collections of many distinguished institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Oliveira passed away in 2010 at his home in Palo Alto, California.
Nathan Oliveira: A Survey, 1959-2010, September 6 – October 13, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Paul Kremer
Stacks, Slopes and Streams August 9 – September 1, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Paul Kremer: Stacks, Slopes and Streams, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American painter Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery as well as his first solo show on the West Coast. It will be on view August 9 through September 1, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, August 9 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Kremer is widely recognized for his striking acrylic paintings that explore and composition while proposing a graphical perception of various artistic styles, including Color Field and Minimalist painting. Sharply painted linear forms create dynamic bodies of work that are at once abstract and recognizable, serious and unpredictable. Kremer challenges the viewer to see everyday imagery—doorways, crevices, animals, mountain ledges, curtains—with subtle hints, allowing his audience to exercise individual perception.
Simplifying painting to its basic elements, Kremer works in a limited yet vibrant palette of bold colors—often in specific hues of orange and blue. In this exhibition, he experiments widely with different blues while peripherally incorporating less frequently used shades of yellow and green. Kremer’s experimentation with color, shape, and form lends his work an iconic sense of aesthetic clarity and artistic purism reminiscent of Josef Alber’s color studies and the work of hard-edge painters such as Frederick Hammersley, John McLaughlin and Ellsworth Kelly.
Kremer’s works do not adhere to a precise template or mode of creation. He experiments with form to create an animated and often playful sense of life. Unbroken planes of color are interrupted by the implied overlay of shapes, which create the illusion of objects submerged in water or obscured by shadows. The surfaces of Kremer’s paintings and works on paper are flat and matte, each work so evenly painted as if almost printed. However, paint dripping along the exposed edges of the canvas (a signature of Kremer’s work) reveals the hand of the artist and his method of applying paint. This relationship between clarity and ambiguity, precision and playfulness, abstract and concrete, lends Kremer’s work an aesthetic and thematic complexity that is at once iconic and contemporary, pushing the boundaries of art by expanding the possibilities of formal elements—form, color, line—to propose a uniquely bold and multifaceted translation of the outside the world.
In this exhibition, three of Kremer’s most recent bodies of work—Stacks, Slopes and Streams—are highlighted. Each of these series allude to a new type of spatial depth that captures one’s attention and encourages viewers to look more closely. In the Stack paintings, multiple triangular forms extending from the right and left edges are layered atop one another, as if loose piles of transparent fabric or leaves of vellum are spread on a tabletop. The Slopes appear as depictions of shadows, whether cast from the setting sun on a hillside or from the curved edge of a sheet of paper. The Streams, while the simplest of them all in compositional structure, can be understood as the complex way in which light, shadow and depth of bodies of water are viewed from above. Whether a long lap pool or a levee, from an aerial perspective these waterways appear in array of shifting shades of blue—the darker shades may be the cast shadows from the embankment or concrete side, or perhaps greater depths in the water, while the lighter shades may be sunlight reflecting off the shallow depths. However, as in all his work, Kremer does not prescribe a way of understanding. Rather, he provides prompts and possibilities—often the titles of the works themselves—that enhance the viewer’s imagination and interpretation, encouraging a deeper way of seeing.
A self-taught artist, Paul Kremer was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1971. For twenty years he owned a graphic design studio, where he worked with such clients as Lou Reed, Tom Waits, MTV, PBS, and National Geographic. He was also a founding member of the art collective I Love You Baby, which was active from 1998 to 2008. Kremer has since become a full-time artist. Recent solo exhibitions include Lean Mechanics, Eugene Binder, Marfa, Texas; Base Zones, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Hometown Bait, Pablo Cardoza, Houston; and Dad’s Garage, Makebish, New York. Kremer lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Paul Kremer: Stacks, Slopes and Streams, August 9 – September 1, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
American Modernism
June 28 – August 24, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present American Modernism, a group exhibition on view June 28 – August 4, 2018. American Modernism will present a significant body of work created by American artists between 1915 and 1960. The exhibition will feature paintings and works on paper by:
Milton Avery Charles Demuth Georgia O'Keeffe
Thomas Hart Benton Arthur Dove Jackson Pollock
Oscar Bluemner Marsden Hartley Charles Sheeler
Charles Burchfield Charles Howard Joseph Stella
Stuart Davis Blanche Lazzell Miklos Suba
As the turn of the century signaled a rapidly changing American identity characterized by unprecedented urban growth and subsequent shifts in the nation’s cultural fabric, artists sought to create a visual language embodying the transforming American landscape and experience. American Modernism presents a compelling selection of works created by pioneering artists who embraced and recounted the evolution and rise of modern America through an array of stylistic and aesthetic principles. In this exhibition, issues of modernity and the realities of urbanization coincide with celebrations of American progress and the triumph of the machine, while artists simultaneously express a nostalgia for an American landscape devoid of human intervention. Compelling representations of the urban sublime – stark geometry, industrial motifs, shifting planes – contrast with a romantic vision of the nation’s countryside rooted in the American spirit of freedom and an enduring reverence for America’s natural landscape. American Modernism reveals the vast spectrum of artistic expressions that occurred throughout this period, as the exhibition features rural landscapes, still-life compositions, industrial environments, domestic architecture, and scenes of human labor. As artists grappled with the expression of modern America following WWI and the search for a uniquely American identity, a range of artistic styles and thematic concerns signaled a profound shift in the nation’s visual culture and a legacy left by those who visualized and documented the country’s sociopolitical, cultural, and physical transformations in both rural and urban contexts.
Capturing the energy and vitality of America’s industrial progress, artists such as Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, and Louis Lozowick focused their work on dynamic advances in technology and industrial construction by emphasizing the stark geometry, hard-edged forms, and manufactured precision that characterized the nation’s evolving cities and local industrial centers. Architectural breakthroughs inspired a profusion of fresh motifs – skyscrapers, smokestacks, bridges, factories – that contributed to the conception of the uniquely American Precisionist style. The Precisionists visualized the Machine Age by borrowing from the European avant-garde with styles such as Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, while these artists simultaneously experimented with a strikingly refined approach to composition, color, and form. Crawford’s Composition (Study for ‘Nacelles under Construction) (1946) and Sheeler’s Red Against White (1957) reveal sharply delineated areas of color and precisely rendered geometric forms that appear to mimic the stark manufactured surfaces of the industrial landscape. Emphasis shifts away from the representation of the human figure to instead accentuate the identity of America’s built environment – an environment where human labor is expelled by the inevitable force of the machine. Streamlined mechanical processes and the exactitude of modern machinery become a dynamic vehicle for artistic expression, inspiring an aesthetic consideration of industrial forms and their relationship to the outside world. Meanwhile, artists such as Stuart Davis explore the rise of consumer culture and contemporary society’s shifting values through bold graphic works incorporating tenets of commercial design and iconography. Davis’s sociopolitical commentary incorporates avant-garde styles such as Fauvism and Cubism yet remains chiefly dedicated to expressing the American experience, from jazz and popular culture to commercial advertising and life in New York City.
In addition to their focus on the nation’s urban centers, American Modernists found inspiration throughout rural and small-town America. The nation’s transforming agricultural industry and the growing prevalence of commercialization across rural America contributed to the conception of the Regionalist movement. Regionalist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton did not take the city as their subjects nor embraced pure abstraction, for they instead diverted from avant-garde styles to create works rooted in the raw, anecdotal expression of rural America. In Threshing Rice (1926), Benton presents a vision of working class America that reveals the increasing integration of industrialization and rural life. These regional representations of American modernism also manifest in a profusion of symbolic imagery – barns, steam shovels, tractors – which embody the country’s working class, while images of houses and household objects suggest an everyday domesticity rooted in rural American life. These regional representations thus provide insight to the variety of social and environmental contexts by which modern America could be translated through artistic creation.
As this exhibition demonstrates, American Modernists proposed a dialogue between the realities of urban America and a nostalgia and reverence for the nation’s untouched landscapes and the simplicity of rural life. Many artists diverted from urban imagery in favor of an America devoid of human mediation and the ramifications of modern technology. Pastoral scenes signal the enduring dynamism and character of the American countryside and a continual infatuation with the natural world, recalling the sublime beauty of the American land proposed by the nineteenth century Transcendentalists. In works such as Georgia O’Keeffe’s Trees (1918), Oscar Bluemner’s Silver Moon (1927), and Arthur Dove’s Study for Cow at Play (1941), the artists experiment with vivid colors, biomorphic shapes, and expressionistic light to incite a spiritual reflection of the outside world. Emotive, poetic landscapes offer a stimulating complement to highly structural, geometric representations of the nation’s architectural climate, thus initiating a dialogue between an embrace of American progress and a nostalgia for the untouched American landscape and life before the Machine Age. At the heart of this dialogue is the search for a uniquely American identity – a search that is inherently connected to the history of American visual culture and its continual evolution. This exhibition thus furthers the exploration of American Modernism by bringing together a pivotal body of work representative of the ceaselessly transforming character of a nation defined by unrelenting progress and burgeoning opportunity yet simultaneously rooted in the powerful history of the land as a symbol of freedom, promise, and national identity. Years later, this body of work and the transitional period it depicts remains a cornerstone of American visual culture and undoubtedly resonates with the radical technological development and ever-evolving sociopolitical landscape central to today’s American experience.
American Modernism, June 28 – August 4, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Minku Kim
Straight Edge Painting May 10 – June 23, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Minku Kim: Straight Edge Painting, an exhibition of recent paintings by Korean artist, Minku Kim. This show marks Kim’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view May 10 through June 23, 2018. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, May 10, 2018 from 5:00 to 8:00pm.
Minku Kim’s Straight Edge Paintings, or ‘S.E.P’s,’ present a unique body of work created by Kim from 2015 to present. This series emphasizes and investigates what Kim cites as the true foundations of painting: light, color, composition, and space. Intimate in scale, the minimalist works derive from a methodical and disciplined approach involving the careful layering of four to seven colors guided by precise compositional strategies and the exclusive use of linear elements.
This series occurred partially as a reaction to the artist’s highly academic and figurative education in fine art, which provided an impetus for Kim’s artistic experimentation and engagement with abstract, linear paintings devoid of curved lines or the volumetric rendering of forms. Kim simultaneously gathered inspiration from a punk movement called “Straight Edge,” a punk rock subculture which sparked his interest in creating his own set of rules for artistic creation. His works derive from a meticulous process of creation that is simultaneously methodical and impulsive. Kim’s painstaking attention to composition and proportion establishes a strong structural foundation which subsequently dictates his application of color, yet the artist does not adhere to a rigid system of painting but rather allows successive layers of paint to alter and energize the original composition. Kim writes, “My paintings operate in a minimalistic way .. I always start out step-by-step, layer-by-layer, without any preconceived notion of how the paintings will turn out. Each piece takes from a few weeks to a year or two, as I constantly modify them.”
Kim’s paintings harken back to his childhood preoccupation with Legos and his continual infatuation with architecture, while he simultaneously remains captivated with elements of the natural world including rivers, oceans, and horizon lines. These architectural and landscape motifs are embedded throughout Kim’s compositions to create a painterly sense of materiality that is simultaneously abstract and representational. His influences include Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Agnes Martin, and Richard Diebenkorn. While Kim’s works recall the iconic paintings of these artists, they nonetheless remain individual in their optical sense of depth and space, which evokes an emotional response grounded in the artist’s disciplined and focused contemplation and visualization of the world around him – what Kim himself describes as a “new language” for visual art. He writes, “I want (my paintings) to look easy as if anyone could paint (them). The truth is that it is not as easy as they appear. That is the beauty of it.”
Minku Kim was born in 1989 in Seoul, South Korea. He studied at the Cooper Union School of Art before attending the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he received his B.F.A. in Painting. He then studied at the New York Studio School in New York City, where he earned his M.F.A. in Sculpture. Kim has held numerous residencies, including the Drawing Marathon and Sculpture Marathon at the New York Studio School Drawing Painting & Sculpture. He earned the Painting Departmental Recognition Award (2011), the MICA Achievement Awards (2011), and the Presidential Scholarship (2012) at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Minku Kim: Straight Edge Painting, May 10 – June 23, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More -
Shara Hughes
Sticks and Stones May 10 – June 23, 2018 Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Shara Hughes: Sticks and Stones, an exhibition of twelve recent paintings by American painter and printmaker, Shara Hughes. This show marks Hughes’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view May 10 through June 23, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 10 from 5:00 to 8:00pm.
Shara Hughes is widely recognized for her inventive landscape paintings and interiors, which probe the boundary between representation and abstraction through an embrace of the artist’s own subconscious. Hughes’s paintings exude a psychological complexity that derives from an idiosyncratic coalescence of memory, observation, and illusionism. The artist brings to life a world that is elegantly chaotic – infused with a vibrant harmony of the organic, the objective, and the surreal. Sinuous forms and spatial distortions coincide with expressive brushstrokes and a vivid color palette to exude an illusionistic sense of whimsy that is simultaneously otherworldly and familiar.
Hughes’s futuristic landscapes recall the illusory outdoor environments of Charles Burchfield, where evocative, semiabstract forms express a mystical sensitivity to weather and light, yet her vibrant palettes create a joyful atmosphere reminiscent of Matisse’s Fauvist landscapes. Color becomes a potent vehicle for expression, rousing and electrifying the enigmatic, organic forms of the natural world. Similar to Matisse or Derain, Hughes delineates forms by engaging with vibrant fields of color and acute transitions in tonality, while she simultaneously structures her compositions through the application of color with bold, isolated brushstrokes. The artist’s gestural mark-making emphasizes the material qualities of her medium, as frenetic marks and thick, impasto brushstrokes create a rhythmic sense of movement and flux that is at once poetic and chaotic.
Hughes portrays the outdoors through a mode of visual experimentation combining both qualities of the observed world in conjunction with a psychological and spiritual rendering of its sensory effects. Her vivid engagement with color and light through the application of energetic brushstrokes takes a cue from the Impressionists’ and Post-Impressionists’ plein air paintings, yet Hughes’ landscapes express an aesthetic and thematic individuality in their uniquely eccentric celebration of the spontaneous and variable outdoors. Her discovery of nature’s capricious sense of whimsy opens the door to a host of aesthetic possibilities, thus renewing and refreshing the genre of landscape painting to embody a contemporary world.
Enigmatic, sinuous forms – swaying tree trunks, curvaceous waterfalls, rippling clouds – coincide with unexpected exercises in color – an aquamarine moon, a lavender-tinted stream, or a crimson sun. Meanwhile, the artist’s visual manipulation of depth and space abolishes traditional approaches to landscape composition in favor of a surreal, psychedelic spectacle that challenges and surprises the human eye. Shifting perspectives, flattened fields of color, and expressive brushstrokes emphasize the visual idiosyncrasies of each environment, offering an intimate sense of place that incites contemplation and curiosity. Straying from conventional spatial relationships involving strict delineations of foreground, middleground, and background, Hughes engages with a myriad of framing strategies to invite the viewer into a surrealistic, prismatic semblance of reality, using dramatic curvilinear silhouettes and organic shapes as visual entry points. In turn, her representations of the natural world act as portals for psychological discovery, inviting her audience to tap into the artist’s subconscious – a miscellaneous interchange of aesthetic and sensory perception, where fantasy and reality coalesce to incite a unique impression of the outside world.
Shara Hughes was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1981. She earned a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 before studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Hughes has achieved numerous awards and residencies, including a room of her work at the 2017 Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Joan Mitchell Fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center in 2007; the Anderson Ranch Artist Residency in Snowmass, CO, in 2005; the Vermont Studio Center Artist and Writers Residency Fellowship Award in 2005; and the Florence Leif Painters Award at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Hughes’s work belongs to numerous prominent museum collections including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; the Denver Museum of Art, Denver; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Hughes lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Shara Hughes: Sticks and Stones, May 10 – June 23, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com. View More
