Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present RIGHT ABOUT NOWISH, an online-only solo exhibition presented through Artsy, featuring recent paintings by Bay Area artist Jenny Sharaf. Click here to view the exhibition and here to enter the virtual viewing room.
RIGHT ABOUT NOWISH unveils a series of large-scale paintings on fabric and works on paper that the artist has created over the last year and during quarantine. While the works embrace Sharaf’s expressive joy for her medium, they also reveal the reclusive nature of maintaining a studio practice amidst the worlds' shifting tides and drastic societal changes. Sharaf’s signature paint-pouring technique, in which she applies thick pools of house paint onto fabric, demonstrates the artist’s ongoing dedication to chance and spontaneity. The saturated hues, serendipitous paint movement, and bright patterning create uniquely immersive spaces that the viewer can almost physically enter.
New to her oeuvre, Sharaf presents works on paper inspired by Kenneth Noland’s “target” paintings. Employing color as a central, generating force in these works, Sharaf refers to the historical language of Abstract, Color Field, and Action painting. Moreover, the artist relies on an intuitive process and eye for color mixing as she radiates hues against one another in concentric expression. In 1965, Kenneth Noland told Time magazine, ‘I’m a one-shot painter’; 35 years later, Sharaf re-energizes that same sense of immediacy with her dynamic, hypnotic, and meditative works.
Jenny Sharaf was born in Los Angeles in 1985. A multidisciplinary artist, her paintings, installations, videos, and happenings simultaneously celebrate process, femininity, and various Abstract art movements. Sharaf also maintains an impressive mural practice, with walls in cities across the globe from Tokyo to Beirut. She received her B.F.A. from University of Hawaii, Manoa and her M.F.A. from Mills College, Oakland. She is currently the artist-in-residence at Space Program SF and will be revealing a new series of ceramics and objects d'art in early Fall. Sharaf lives and works between San Francisco and Sausalito.
