Matt Kleberg, Dovecote Loveboat, 2023, oilstick on canvas, 84 x 70 inches
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie kicks off the fall art season with a curated selection of work in a variety of media from five different cities. Ranging from Jeffrey Gibson’s moving abstractions with linguistic references at Sikkema Jenkins & Co and April Gornik’s luminous landscape paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York to Matt Kleberg’s geometric canvases of architectural elements at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg’s snapshots of famous friends at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
7. Matt Kleberg at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
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 to spark ideas for small-scale studies and larger paintings of architectural elements reduced to colorful, geometric forms. Mostly mesmerized by entryways and windows, he isolates their arched and rectangular structures and paints them in contrasting colors—often creating textured surfaces through the use of oil stick on canvas.
In the gallery’s exhibition, Pigeon Holes, the San Antonio-based artist has made a series of canvases based on an ancient Roman columbarium, a building with small niches for funerary urns. Employing these pigeon hole compartments as his point of departure, Kleberg paints meditative works that abstractly convey the sense of an urban environment in the same way that these age-old, domesticated birds let us know that we are at the very heart of one.
Through October 13
