Altman Siegel is thrilled to present The Roof is on Fire, an exhibition of new paintings enhanced with augmented reality by Troy Lamarr Chew II. This will be the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

In Chew’s ongoing Slanguage series, coded meanings within wordplay in rap lyrics are teased out visually through the painting of everyday objects that carry specific symbolic innuendo. The paintings featured in The Roof is on Fire expand upon this body of work, adding legendary hip-hop dance crazes to the artist’s ever-evolving pictorial dictionary. Still carried out with the same tight realist skill, these new works move away from previous paintings’ art historical reference to Flemish still-life and further toward the Surrealist landscape and the palette of animation.

Benbanaste Gallery is excited to present What Was It That The Leaf Wanted by Kemal Önsoy. The exhibition features 4 acrylic on canvas paintings made between 2016 and 2017 through which the artist continues to explore the dialogue between poetry and art. Below is an excerpt from his writings from 2001 that gave the title and inspiration to this series:

What was it that the leaf wanted: ember for snow, soil for water, the below that can sense falling, the above that can touch, 

A tree with blood circulation, two separate firsts for the one that can not advance.

In the past few days, it seemed like there is no light, is the smell of my leaf withheld even from the bottom of my root?

Automatic day, be incapable of reducing to yourself.

Do not be found with me.

Be incapable of working to advance.

Kemal’s work has been featured in international exhibitions including the 25th Sao Paulo Biennale, the 44th Venice Biennale and the 4th and 7th Istanbul Biennales. He currently resides and works in Turkey.

Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of works by Los Angeles based artist Gary Lang.

Known for his highly structured formal investigations of line and color, Gary Lang’s exploration of pictorial space through abstraction has produced works he calls “ecstatic meditations”.  Finely crafted of dazzling, optically charged hues, Lang’s dynamic color choices are intuitive rather than formulaic.  Lang masterfully uses bands of color in each painting to create a visual tension that creates the illusion of visual depth.

Gary Lang’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and is found in public and private collections worldwide.

Casemore Gallery is pleased to present a selection from ‘Sonya Rapoport: Fabric Paintings’, the current exhibition on view at the gallery through February 5, 2022. The exhibition features rarely-seen sculptural canvases and bold painting on patterned fabric by the late Bay Area artist Sonya Rapoport (1923-2015).

First shown in 1967, Rapoport’s ‘Fabric Paintings’ represents a radical departure for the artist who had previously been recognized as an Abstract Expressionist painter. This exhibition reveals the origin of Rapoport’s systematic abstraction of the female form and her first experiments with painting on found materials. Rapoport’s paintings anticipate the Pattern and Decoration movement of the mid-1970s, which explored textiles and ornamentation.

In the fall of 2021, Bay Area-based photographer Catherine Wagner worked in the Crown Point Press studio. Using the photogravure process, she created a nine-panel print, five diptychs, and three large single-image works. In this presentation, we are showing a selection of four prints.

Wagner began by creating still lifes using blocks of wood which she then photographed. She often shoots photographs on site, and she remarked that the light and space of the Crown Point studio were perfectly suited to her idea for the project. She describes that idea as “creating something between a drawing and a photograph.”

The Crown Point printers, led by Emily York, first made film positives from the photographs. These were etched using the photogravure process with aquatint onto copper plates. Wagner remarked she was in her “blue period,” and that the work she was doing had architectural foundations. The shade of blue she chose for the prints, she said, is reminiscent of the blue used in architectural drawings.

 Still Wave shows a piece of wood curved on one side with the end grain exposing the tree’s growth lines. The artist remarked that she thought of this image as representing time as an abstraction.

 Spatial Verbs uses form as a substitute for language; the nine images create a formal narrative. Language I and Language II: Displaced Shadow explore a dialogue between the object and its shadow. The empty space between and around can set up new ways of seeing. Minimal in design, all these images are intimate architected portraits that are, in fact, simply beautiful.

“I’m most comfortable representing the nude as minimal and timeless. I like to cherish the body as a source of inspiration, as a platform for metaphors, for intimacy and complexities of human nature. It is my way of investigating the deepest questions about life.” – mk

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed, a new exhibition of photographs. Acting as both subject and producer, Gutierrez explores the multiplicity and complexity of identity in a series of pop-influenced narrative scenes. The exhibition, which takes its name from Cher’s 1973 album, includes selections from three recent series, Body En Thrall, Plastics, and Indigenous Woman, the 124-page magazine for which Gutierrez acted as muse, model, photographer, and art director, creating every element from fashion spreads and ads to an editor’s letter. A Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn, this is the artist’s inaugural show with Fraenkel Gallery. The exhibition is on view at 49 Geary Street until January 29, 2022

Katja Farin (b. 1996) lives and works in Los Angeles. They received a BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. They have had solo presentations at Era Gallery (Milan), Lubov (New York) and in lieu (Los Angeles) and have been included in group exhibitions at Beers (London), Wilding Cran (Los Angeles) and Nicodim (Los Angeles).

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present a solo presentation of new paintings by San Francisco-based artist Dennis Brown. For his third solo exhibition with the gallery Brown explores a mix of figurative and still life paintings with themes that scratch the surface of nostalgic memories from Brown’s past. Inspired by the artist’s formative years, living in the Pacific (Hawaii, Okinawa & Japan), Brown’s work encompasses natural beach scenery and plant life along with his classic portraitures.

Drawing from the artist’s past, these paintings collage themes of memories, moments, and representations. Depicting not just one person in particular but a combination of multiple people from the artists life and inspired by the artists own background of Jamaican and Filipino decent. Brown’s color palette is bold and explores the contrast of bright colors placed next to dark tones encompassing a range of pastel pinks and blues mixed with natural tones of green, beige and brown.

Traditionally working with pen and ink on paper, Brown’s new paintings on canvas have transitioned to have a physically larger presence. The size of these works envelope the viewer in a colorful world, bringing a sense of familiarity and comfort.

Ranging in mediums from exposures on gelatin silver photo paper, to reclaimed wood lath constructions, woven linen, and layered painting and drawing on canvas, Rachelle Bussières, Blaise Rosenthal, Susie Taylor and Andy Vogt explore repetition, light, elemental materials, and a play on dimensionality. Beyond materials and process, this group draws our attention to an open and varied landscape where an endless possibility of sight lines and visual experiences can be imagined. It also alludes to the idea of “planes of abstraction” where new and open-ended visual languages provide a way of examining the endless potentials of conscious reality.

K. Imperial Fine Art is excited to present Living in Color, a group exhibition focusing on the impact of color as it enriches and enhances daily life. Vibrant hues play a defining roll in the featured works by Steven Alexander, Catherine Howe, Andrea Myers, and Vicki Sher. The exhibition is on view by appointment from January 5 to 31, 2022, with an opening reception on January 15, from 4pm to 6pm.

For many of us color is taken for granted as a passive part of our environment, but to the artist, color is an active ingredient. For Alexander, Howe, Myers, and Sher, the use of pigment stretches beyond conveyance of value and composition and into the realm of the emotional where their selections elicit or heighten a visceral response to their work.

Marrow Gallery presents the paintings of San Francisco based Hiroshi Sato.  Sato’s work focuses on memory and meaning and how these change over time. The simplest memories that contribute to our personal narrative are the artist’s main point of reference; the glimpses of past experiences that are triggered by smells, sounds and feelings.

In his process, Sato marries the duality of his life with his formal training. His greatest influences; Diebenkorn, Park, Avery, coalesce with his knowledge of traditional Japanese methods, theories and compositional philosophies. Sato has no preference for either ideology of picture making, therefore they become a tool to further fictionalize the already dubious accuracy of what is being depicted.

“Canopy” presents new works by Maybaum Gallery artists who pay homage to one of nature’s greatest resources.

Korean artist, Ilhwa Kim meticulously hand-dyes in thousands of different colors and then cuts and rolls these tiny pieces of paper into small “seeds” to create her landscapes.  Each landscape encompasses thousands of these seeds and each seed composes a tiny single universe, unique to itself.  The completed work is an undulating, every changing world.

Using a router to carve into his wood panels, Karl Klingbiel unveils the mystery of his wall paintings. A combination of woodcarving, mono-printing, collage and oil paint applied with squeegee, traditional brushes and airbrush. “The paintings are in essence structures, akin to the structures that comprise the physical, historical, and psychic structures that make up our daily lives, but which we cannot see in the aggregate; we see fragments of them, as they float to the perceivable surface of daily experience and our ongoing frames of reference. […] As paintings these structures become more or less meditative objects that serve as markers to our perceptions of the phenomenal—both concrete and virtual—world that surrounds us.”

Victoria Wagner sources wood from the Northern California forest fires for her large-scale totem sculptures as a way to provide connection to the land and as a practice of stewardship.  Her material choice is inspired by the sentient and energetic exchange between objects and living creatures “I’m drawn to that which is familiar but overlooked. […] Through the prolonged intimacy of debarking, shaping and sanding, I slowly but continuously discover wood’s inner workings, its secrets and history. […] Through engagement and observation of nature’s patterns, I witness coincidence, reveal symbols, notice colors, explore relationships and feel a deep resonance with the spirit of the land. Overlaying geometric constellations onto organic topographies, my abstract compositions are as narrative as tree rings or cell structure.”

Founded in 2006, Mercury 20 is a contemporary art gallery established, supported and operated by San Francisco Bay Area artists. Mercury 20 maintains a gallery space in Oakland, California, as well as an online sales platform. Our collective operating structure sustains our community and allows us to experiment, develop, exhibit and advance our work.

Plants, Portraits, Filters, & Fibers is an introduction to the work of 4 of our exhibiting artists. We invite you to visit our website and further explore the work of these and other Mercury 20 Gallery artists.

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Matthew Picton titled The Age of Kali, on view from January 5 to February 26, 2022. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

The public is invited to meet artist Matthew Picton at the gallery on Saturday, January 8, from 3:30pm to 5:30pm.

Pamela Walsh Gallery is pleased to present Legacies, a selection of works by Los Angeles-based artist Cody Bayne. Cody is an interdisciplinary artist working with paint, mixed media, sculpture and new media to explore impermanence, identity and coded vernaculars. Living and working in LA, he sources materials from the urban landscape to create a personal and sociocultural narrative. Images, text and words develop into a visual vernacular that is both familiar and enigmatic. “I am interested in the relationship between contemporary art and cultural intersectionality. I’m drawn to the beauty of flawed and discarded materials, which are physically present everywhere and simultaneously overlooked. I harvest information from the environment of the city and reassemble the materials into Neo-Urban Expressionist compositions.” The work is executed with a balance of formulaic parameters and action-oriented processes; immediacy and accidental interventions play a strong role in the making of the work. “Though I do not intentionally approach the work through a filter of social commentary, I am keenly aware that the poetry of the metropolis leads to this conversation.”

Cornelia Schulz at Intersect Palm Springs, February 10 —13, 2022

We’re excited to present a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Cornelia Schulz in the first in-person edition of Intersect Palm Springs. A printed catalog will be available for preorder, covering select paintings from 2021 – 2018 with an essay by Kenneth Baker.

“It is the unhurried quality of her work that impresses more than its implicitly expressive variations of speed or intensity in gestures or color incidents. Each painting, once begun, is a ticking timepiece, rhyming in ways known only to her with the hours of her days and the pulses of creative anxiety.”
– Kenneth Baker (1946 – 2021)

Cornelia Schulz (b. 1936) lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. For close to 50 years, she has honed her skills in abstract paintings of complex shape and color. Her early education in the arts began at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954 through 1957, the heyday of the California Ceramics Revolution. She studied sculpture in clay and wood with Renzo Fenci (1914 – 1999), and drawing from Herbert Jepson (1908 –1993). She received her BFA in painting (1959) and her MFA in welded steel sculpture (1961) from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Cornelia Schulz began her teaching career at the University of California Davis Art Department in 1973, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2002. At UC Davis, Schulz became the first female Chair of the Department of Art from 1988 – 1992, serving again in 1995. Cornelia Schulz is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport; and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, California, as well as many national and international collections.

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to share a suite of new crocheted copper works by Mexican-American artist ektor garcia, a preview of our upcoming solo booth at FOG Design+Art. Featuring both two- and three-dimensional sculptural pieces, garcia’s process is synthesized through the mark of his own hand.

A multidisciplinary artist, garcia’s practice utilizes craftwork connected to his own biography and cultural inheritance, including queer culture and traditional Mexican craft. Individual works and installations make use of deeply varied textures, techniques, and materials side-by-side, such as lace, weaving, and crochet, as well as ceramics and metalwork. His pieces can be at once sensual, evoking the human body, as well as reference architectural and natural forms. Conceptually speaking, garcia’s work subtly conveys historical and biographical narratives counterposed with brutal political commentary on those same subjects. His pieces often give the impression of a collection of family heirlooms or exhumed artifacts, suggesting an embedded past and future in each object.

ektor garcia received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and his MFA from Columbia University in 2016. He has had solo institutional exhibitions at the Sculpture Center, New York, and the Museum Folkwang, Essen Germany. In 2019 garcia was included in the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art. In 2021 he participated in the La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio in New York as well as an exhibition highlighting artists with ties to Mexico City at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico. garcia’s work is currently on view in Prospect 5 New Orleans, curated by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, opened 23 October 2021 through 23 January 2022.

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce its fifth solo exhibition with New York artist Elise Ferguson, Sequence. Using pattern and color, along with a range of process-driven approaches and modern materials, Ferguson creates works based on mathematical puzzles and geometric variations that land somewhere at the intersection of painting, sculpture and printmaking. The results are beautiful works that reflect the artist’s intuitive use of geometry.

Elise Ferguson grew up surrounded by color theory, design history and international traditions in architecture. Her mother was a clothing designer, and her stepfather was an architect. Early introduction to textiles, patterns, construction, modernism, profoundly inspired and shaped Ferguson’s visual thinking.

Sequence – the following of one thing after another; a continuous or connected series; a melodic or harmonic pattern repeated at different pitches – consists of a series of paintings. Related yet independent, the works in the exhibition form something like a string of sentences or musical score – where disparate elements play a role in creating meaning together. Lucy Lippard noted that ‘energy is buried in the neutral form and activated by the idea.’ Buried in Ferguson’s work, in her prescriptions, is a sense of possibilities of the transformational. Her simple, modular forms offer a structure through which precise, serial variations can be endlessly played out, acting as a generative matrix. Variations in line, ratio, thickness, patterns, and formulas create the permutations that activate each modular form, transforming it from neutral to kinetic.

The grid of black and white paintings offers possibilities for seemingly endless permutations and serial variation. As with ostinato in music, a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm, Ferguson adopts a singular image, and alters it slightly to fit a changing harmony; stop, start, stutter, repeat. The black lines wander between thick and thin, creating meaning much like the way staccato and legato offer musical articulation. The negative space and the continuous yellow line, woven throughout, pull the eye through the sequence, through the logical arrangement of abstract images. While the insistence on the repeated form holds the overall tone and character of the work, the varied patterns can be considered “the playground in which the work grows strong and self-confident.” (Edward E Lewinsky). Conversely, Crocus introduces a finite, looping sequence, using the color wheel and its gradients as design. The sequence of works travels along the left wall and makes its way through the gallery, offering an interpretation, via abstraction, of the flexible nature of perception. Pattern and color are communicators, each one exploring a different rhythm, vibration, and temperature.

ELISE FERGUSON ( b.1964 Richmond, VA) earned her MFA from The University of Illinois, Chicago in 1995, and her BFA from The School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. Her work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery, 57W57 Arts, Halsey Mckay, and Barton College Art Galleries, amongst others. Selected group exhibitions include Massey Klein, Illinois State University, Able Baker Contemporary, Dieu Donné Papermill and Johannes Vogt Gallery, amongst others. Awards and Residencies include the 2018 Dieu Donne Paper Variables Artist, the 2014 Northern Trust Purchase Prize – Expo Chicago, Artist-in-Residence: Illinois State University, SIU-Carbondale, University Museum: Merit Award, MacDowell Colony and the Socrates Sculpture Park Residency. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, Contemporary Magazine, Interior Design, Art on Paper, Modern Painters and Art News, amongst others.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.

Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to present Salt Moon, an exhibition of new works by Bay Area artist Rachelle Reichert. This is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

In Salt Moon, Reichert considers salt harvested from the San Francisco Bay as material memory: a marker of a specific time in a specific environment where she resides. Sea salt is left on the Bay’s shores in relation to the tides of the ocean by the pull of the moon, drought, and sea level rise. The moon serves to cleanse the contaminated Bay of mercury, which remains long after gold was taken from the nearby hills. The salt sits in a steel frame, corroding the steel over time. Traces of human presence are included in the works; upon close looking, one will notice tiny scraps of plastic alongside organic material. Reichert’s works highlights the physical world and puts us back in place as technology and urbanization estrange us from our environment by disembodying and accelerating the human experience.

The first step to healing and repair is often cleansing. Salt is known for its healing properties. It has been used in rituals all around the world to create safe spaces and clear negative energies. These works take the qualities of salt a step further, addressing social and environmental issues. This series of work began in late 2016 after a wave of violence against women. Reflecting on female pagan rituals, the series began with the intention of creating safe space and protection for female identifying people.

The gallery will have an opening for the artist Saturday, January 15th, 1-5pm.