Altman Siegel is proud to present highlights from two current exhibitions currently on view at the gallery. We can decide, is a solo exhibition of brand new works by Zarouhie Abdalian and Cascadence is a group exhibition featuring the work of, amongst others, Terry Adkins and Brandon Ndife.

Throughout We can decide, a state of suspension pervades the space of the gallery and threnody for the unwilling martyrs is its emblem. Set just slightly in motion, five brass signaling bells sound out their indeterminate status, both and alternately signifying and hailing, marking and calling, meaning and doing. In recognition of the mass murder Abdalian asks us to lay at the feet of the U.S. government, it may be read as a memorial and an incitation.

Emerging during the mid-80’s in his native Washington D.C., Terry Adkins’ interdisciplinary history and use of reduced, abstracted forms complicate the impulse to settle on a singular, deterministic view of his artistic outcomes. His poetic reframing of found objects as ‘potential disclosures’ proposes a revaluing of objects as storied throughways of information. Viewed in the gallery is Tambour (2013), a presence rendering sound as silent. Hear, a witness of gravity’s impulse.

Described as a non-position between decay and regrowth, New Jersey-based artist Brandon Ndife’s sculptural works address the subjective nature of lived experience through detritus and symbolism. Activating commonplace, found, and inherited materials to question the limits and possible lives of objects, Ndife recasts living forms. Concerning entropy, both Nantucket and Nightshade Sidetable (both 2021) propose an oscillation between an aesthetic of evacuation and a process of becoming.

Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to present Karl Benjamin: Selected Paintings 1967-1978. A major Southern California painter and one of the original Hard-edge abstract painters, the exhibition focuses on Benjamin’s intensive exploration of color relationships through compositional structure.

An intuitive painter, Karl Benjamin (1925-2012) was deeply interested in the expressive possibilities created by combining and shaping color. Works such as #14 (1977) employ fuchsias, blues, greens, and reds as narrow stripes of contrasting colors that vibrate with intensity. In #3 (1969) Benjamin divided the canvas into irregular polygons, where interlocking areas of red, orange, yellow and blue form a composition without end. Works like #1 (1970) are visually charged, gridded arrangements of right triangles, whose complex arrangements of color both imply and subvert a sense of perceptual depth. Benjamin’s use of bold pattern and color, combined with the deceptively flat surfaces of his paintings, give each work a unique optical presence.

In 1959, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized a landmark exhibition entitled “Four Abstract Classicists” presenting works by four Los Angeles artists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. The show’s curator coined the term “hard edge painting,” noting their similar stylistic concerns. Their works are characterized by clean edged, conjoined geometric forms rendered in flat color and occupying the entire picture plane. Benjamin’s work has been featured in numerous important exhibitions, including Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury, which debuted at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2007 and later travelled to the Oakland Museum and other U.S. venues; A Conversation With Color: Karl Benjamin, Paintings 1953 – 1995 at the Claremont Museum of Art, in 2009; and Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Paintings and Sculpture 1945-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2011.

“Revolution is not a one time event.” – Audre Lorde

Continuing the celebration of CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions’ seven year anniversary, and in light of many transitions globally and locally, we are delighted to present a second part to the Janus exhibition we presented digitally in the autumn of 2020. Janus II draws from the gallery’s past seven years and offers a glimpse into its next seven with work by Miya Ando, Marcela Pardo Ariza, Chris Fallon, Rebekah Goldstein, Amy Lincoln, Terri Loewenthal, Masako Miki, Amy Nathan, and James Perkins presented physically at Fused Space, and here on 8-bridges with works by Pardo-Ariza, Fallon, Loewenthal, Nathan, and Perkins.

Much has shifted since CULT was born: public optimism collapsed under the weight of emboldened racial bigotry, anti-globalist populism, and policy decisions that have wrought untold harm on the environment and marginalized individuals. On this occasion for reflection we consider Janus, the two-headed Roman deity presiding over the future and the past, transitions and doorways. As we navigate thresholds, at once cultural, political, and biological, the duality of Janus allows us to envision a stronger, more equitable future fueled by a cognizance of our shared responsibility to the planet and to each other.

Works by Pardo Ariza and Perkins investigate care and belongingness and the role language plays in building our realities and communities—Pardo Ariza creates a trans-historical kinship bringing the archive in dialogue with the contemporary, while Perkins labors the boundaries of materiality. Works by Loewenthal re-imagine our relationship and responsibility to the land; the works of Nathan and Fallon reconsider the illusionistic permanence of our current structures and identities—retrieving histories of the past to build new systems for a new world, one that prioritizes and benefits us all. Janus is a talisman for optimism in light of a polarized cultural climate; this exhibition meditates upon the opportunities, rather than challenges, that arise from the ‘new normal’ we are collectively living.

To make an appointment to see the full exhibition, contact us at info@cultexhibitions.com.

Marrow Gallery is pleased to introduce works from gallery artists Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Kelly Inouye, Stephanie Robison and Jordan Holms.

Kimia Ferdowsi Kline’s Mother Tongue marks a significant formal shift in Kline’s oeuvre from oil painting on traditional rectilineal planes to a mixed media approach centralizing papyrus surfaces and incorporating thread, pearls, beads, glitter, and ink. Parallel to this emergence of new materials, Kline distills her subject matter into body-based lexicons as a tool to decipher the expansive mysteries of human relationships. Cut out from the distractions of place, situation, context, and even gravity, these emotionally-charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self and each other. Mother Tongue, opens at Marrow Gallery on May 12th.

Kelly Inouye’s large-scale watercolors were inspired by the televised world of women’s pro wrestling and feminist writing on the topic of women’s anger. In these works, sweeping washes of iridescent pigments depict skilled female athletes staging choreographed physical battles. These figures push, shove, choke, and slam against portrayals of the female body as docile, still, passive, and available within mainstream culture, art history, and social media. Inouye will have a solo exhibition in November 2021. 

Stephanie Robison’s sculptural works often use humor or the absurd to address uncontrollable aspects of the body, the self, the environment, and relationships. Created out of wood, fabric, stone, steel, foam, and plastic, her works synthesize and fuse: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, soft with hard, the handmade and the uniform industrial.

Jordan Holms works primarily in painting, sculpture, and textiles. Her abstract compositions explore how space is organized and assigned meaning. Coded objects that have historically operated as signifiers of power and oppression in material culture collapse into the single plane of her work.

Woody De Othello constructs intentionally wonky, anthropomorphized sculptures of common artifacts of domestic life—tables, radiators, flower vases, lamps, television sets—in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass. Othello infuses his work with humor, whimsy, and touches of African “Nkisi,” a belief system in which spirits inhabit everyday objects. In both his sculptures and works on paper, Othello imbues these static household objects with movement and emotion—they are often stretched or slumped over, seemingly overcome by gravity. He received a BFA from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton and an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco. He was included in the 33rd Ljublijana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljublijana, Slovenia, and has recently exhibited with Karma, New York (2019); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, California (2018); Quality, Oakland, California (2016); and UFO Gallery, Berkeley, California (2016). In 2019-2020, Othello was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, California.

As the bracketed dates in their titles indicate, each of Pitt’s drawings is a record of elapsed time. Aside from corresponding to a specific period in the artist’s life and practice, the drawings are determined by intuition, rather than strict diaristic record-keeping. Where some drawings are populated exclusively by a grid-like procession of forms, others are interspersed with fragments of language or still-life renderings of objects in the artist’s studio.

Through a combination of densely colored forms, glyph-like clusters of lines, and cryptic–yet evocative–handwritten text, Pitt’s works on paper offer an intimate access point into the artist’s practice. Each drawing can be interpreted equally as a calendar for an autobiographical understanding of time, or as an array of free-associative schematics for an ever-evolving body of work.

For four decades Edward Burtynsky has explored through diverse photographic projects the complex global intersection of industrial growth and environmental impact. Edward Burtynsky’s color photographs document the many facets of landscape as it is transformed through human industry. Exquisitely detailed and exactingly rendered, his images strike an intricate balance between a somber reportage and a powerfully seductive aesthetic, reflecting the dilemma between society’s desire for prosperity and its impact on the environment.

Adam Katseff’s reductive photographs while minimalist in approach, on closer inspection present the viewer with rich and exceptional detail. His Rivers and Falls series feature iconic locations, which also captivated and inspired influential earlier artists. This is no coincidence, as Katseff conceptually set off to recapture these specific locations and in doing so recontextualize the landscape. Katseff remarks, “The subjects of my recent work are at the same time familiar and elusive. The outline of the image is easy to see, and as with memory our imagination must supply the rest.”

Mimi Plumb’s dystopian images provide the viewer with a narrative that is as much ominous as it is seductively mesmerizing and compassionately human. In her early twenties, Mimi Plumb looked back to her Californian childhood to make a series of photographs about suburban youth.

French-American conceptual artist Nancy Wilson-Pajic, played a seminal role in the international artistic avant-garde during the 1960s and 70s with her feminist performances and text-sound installations that challenged feminine role model in modern societal paradigms. The artist moved to Paris in 1978 where she began to experiment with photography along with forms of text-based imagery. Her early experiments with photography lead her to alternative processes such as these unique cyanotype photograms.

Simon Breitbard Fine Arts is pleased to present the work of Matt Devine, Jon Krawczyk, Markham Johnson, and Kija Lucas. Devine and Krawczyk conjure organic shapes inspired by nature from seemingly rigid, raw metals. The contrasts of nature and industry, light and shadow, chaos and order are themes explored by both sculptors.

Johnson’s photography, using a large format camera, immerses the viewer in the monumental power of the natural environment. His series, The Point of Kings: Point Reyes Rediscovered, is a narrative of West Marin, documenting the beauty, serenity and people that make up the Point Reyes National Sea Shore. Kija Lucas, in contrast, uses the photographic method of scanning to capture plant material gathered on location while following the emigration patterns of her family across the United States. Lucas connects these plants to the racial taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus while exploring concepts such as colonialism, heritage and, ultimately, home.

These works are on view at our San Francisco and Menlo Park galleries, which are currently open by appointment.