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The Gallery produces limited run color catalogs for many of our solo exhibitions, available for purchase at the gallery. | |||
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Tad Wiley in the room for painting |
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Tad Wiley |
Tad Wiley's Water Log series, mounting a selection of his recent oil-based enamels on wooden panels that continue to develop the themes and methods of the preceding works on paper. Wiley's concerns are so seamless between the two bodies of work, I feel compelled to restate my observations about his art from the earlier show, that he evokes, both through his own imagery and the emotional tone of his color and light, certain associations with the stoic stance of the Northern Seaboard. He works in a vernacular that is pre-linguistic, but nonetheless of a kindred spirit to literature, such as Melville. These are luminous works in the spirit of the heroic generation of American abstract art. |
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Alan Ebnother in the room for painting |
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Alan Ebnother |
Exhibition 08 in the room for painting showcases recent monochrome paintings by Alan Ebnother. Originally from the Bay Area, Ebnother now maintains studios in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Leipzig, Germany. His work has been exhibited extensively over the last 20 years in Europe. Ebnother's oils, in hand-ground dry pigment on stretched linen and wood panels, are characterized by rich impasto, dense pigmentation, and an intuitive, acrobatic marking. A few months prior to our July, 2009 solo show of Alan Ebnother here in the room for painting, he had begun work on a series of blue tonal paintings in his characteristic impasto. In a number of these pieces, Ebnother has moved to open up his stroke, revealing more of the paint support and pushing the color into a broader range of hue. To mark our release of a new catalog documenting the 2009 show that includes some of these recent blue paintings, we are hanging a small selection from the series in the front room. |
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Roger Herman in the room for painting |
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Roger Herman |
For the 16th exhibition in the room for painting we are showing acclaimed Los Angeles-based painter Roger Herman, selections from his paintings with floral motifs. When I first met Roger he was already fully immersed in his signature expressionistic blend of the Berlin Neue Wilde school of artists such as Rainer Fetting and Helmut Middendorf, and the Bay Area Figuration of David Park and Elmer Bischoff. To this buttery mix, Herman brings a generous sense of humor and an encyclopedic grasp of art history and painting technique. He tends to tirelessly work variations on a theme, exploring the nooks and crannies of any given path like a puppy off the leash. His tulips, poppies and cacti share the studio with mountains, apartment facades, institutional interiors, high school dancers, large portrait heads and working class genre scenes. When William Blake said that energy is eternal delight, he could have been talking about Roger Herman, whose paintings, woodcuts and ceramics are about freedom, engagement, and the world as a parade of open, unfettered possibilities. |
Roger Herman |
Special edition woodcut of unique prints created by Roger Herman for his show being offered on a first come first serve basis. Prints at the gallery available in black, yellow, red, green and orange pulls. |
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Ward Schumaker in the room for painting |
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Ward Schumaker |
For the 15th show in the room for painting we are introducing the painting of San Francisco artist Ward Schumaker. Schumaker’s work has an agile spine, springing from an ever-evolving center of art historical balance. Without warning Schumaker will often introduce texts and iconic sketches into his abstract expressionist dust devils, calling on an ensemble cast of welter weight boxers, stylized fairies, abstract monkeys and kneeling sirens named Betty. He can treat painting like a garage sale and still have it come across as something pure and untainted. He does this with his touch and with his spirit and with an ingrained familiarity with the medium born of longstanding, diligent practice. He melds these disparate elements without losing the paint in it all because the paint is already in his marrow. Why juggle an ironing board, a tire iron and a stray cat? Because you can, just as you can celebrate the agility of the human spirit, steeped in tradition and poised for discovery at every turn. | ||
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Tama Hochbaum in the room for paper |
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Tama Hochbaum |
Helping us to celebrate our first year anniversary with our 11th show in the room for paper is Chapel Hill-based photographer Tama Hochbaum, whose composite tree series inaugurated our program along with Judith Belzer's painting when we opened the gallery last October. Hochbaum will be showing a new body of work, large, grid-arranged pigment prints, composited from her digital photographs, most of which were taken in motion from a car or on walks. The color and dynamism of these images show her roots as a painter, and further develop the sensibilities of a nascent approach to photography that might be described as trans-focus, an idea touched upon in September's informal group hanging here. An expanded version of Hochbaum's catalog, originally produced for exhibition 01, is being released for this showing, Hochbaum’s second exhibition in the room for paper. | ||
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Marie Thibeault in the room for painting |
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Marie Thibeault OUT OF PRINT |
For venue 07 in the room for painting we are pleased to be showing recent canvases by Marie Thibeault, with a selection of the work coming to us directly from her exhibit at the Torrance Museum. Thibeault, formerly of the Bay Area and now based in Los Angeles, is Professor of Art at California State University Long Beach and a recipient of multiple grants from that institution. Thiebeault uses source images of natural disasters such as Katrina, often from clippings, as her catalyst to improvise gestural overlays of sophisticated color and thicketed space. Her compositions seem to be held in abeyance at the moment they could either explode or implode. Although her subject matter is ostensibly chaos, her formal coalescence and the harmonics of her color speak to recovery, and an order more generative than deconstructed. | ||
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Stephen Westfall in the room for paper |
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Stephen Westfall OUT OF PRINT |
For exhibition seven in the room for paper we are honored to present recent gouaches by renown New York painter and critical writer Stephen Westfall. Westfall is a recipient of this year's Prix de Rome, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, three NEAs, two New York State Council on the Arts Awards, the 2006 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Arts, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is widely reviewed, most recently in the April issue of Art in America. Westfall's painting is as democratic as it is bipolar, and he extols the virtues of both states. These intimate gouaches tread the fine balance between a conceptually based abstraction and an intuitive navigation rooted in the experiences of the body; between the strange forces of art history and contemporary culture, and the gravitational forces that channel color and light. | ||
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Nan Grand-Jean in the room for painting |
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Nan Grand-Jean OUT OF PRINT |
For the sixth exhibition in the room for painting we are pleased to be showing the recent work of San Francisco painter Nan Grand-Jean. Grand-Jean's painting is guided by the light. Something of a transcendentalist, she dissolves into a gestural color/light all the sense impressions of the world around her, the world of her imagination and the movements of her own body. Her work is marked by a sensitivity of touch, a depth of surface and an apt sense of scale, but first and foremost by a handling of color that gives back a wonderful luminosity. Grand-Jean conceives in terms of divine light, our access to it and the obstructions that block us from it. Her work hovers on the threshold of what we see and what we sense, at once corporeal and still somehow beyond what we can grasp, an intimation of the metaphysical. | ||
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Michael Davidin the room for painting |
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 Michael David |
For the fifth exhibition in the room for painting I am excited to introduce San Francisco audiences to the exceptional work of Michael David, Professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department of the Art Institute of Boston. David’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fogg Art Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. He studied with Philip Guston and Vija Celmins. For this series, David plays with the word field and its many art historical associations. While his image may be a faithfully rendered field of grass, it is also a monochromatic field of color with the articulated marking of radical painting. David improvises, starting with sweeping gestures that slowly focus and find their identity as composition and form. His achievement is a high synthesis of the abstract, the figurative, and the concrete. | ||
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Chris Ashley in the room for painting |
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Chris Ashley OUT OF PRINT |
Oakland based artist Chris Ashley has gained respect from art world insiders over the last few years for a unique series of HTML coded drawings he posts daily on his blog. A year's worth of prints from this online body of work was recently exhibited at David Cunningham Gallery in San Francisco. Parallel to this effort, Ashley has maintained a disciplined studio practice as an accomplished painter. Over the last three years he has been working on a formally related group of small canvases, oil and industrial metalic paint on linen, which he refers to simply as the Blue and Green Paintings. We are pleased to be able to present a representative selection from this series. | ||
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Judith Belzer in the room for painting |
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Judith Belzer OUT OF PRINT |
Judith Belzer will show multi panel paintings continuing her ongoing series, "The Inner Life of Trees." Belzer's paintings explore the interdependencies of the natural world. They oblige us to reconsider the term, realism. They function at once as accurate and revealing renderings of their motif, and as working metaphors for the discipline of painting itself. Her work is profoundly layered, and remarkable in the depth of its parallel exploration of both nature and the nature of paint. Judith Belzer understands what a swinging gate the nature that surrounds us is. She understands our integral part in it. Her paintings affirm our place in that continuum, where our inner life is shared, even with the trees, through surfaces that run deeper than we can imagine. Belzer works in Berkeley, where she lives with her husband, writer Michael Pollan. | ||
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| Books are printed by Ben Zlotkin's Edition One Studios in Berkeley. | |||
