Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new works and earlier pieces by the San Francisco-based British artist Richard T. Walker. 

Using a variety of media, including video, music, photography, sculpture and performance — sometimes intermixed — Walker creates works that immerse the viewer in their own experience of the landscape.  Featured on 8-bridges will be a series of new works, including neon sculptures, light boxes and photographic installations, as well as earlier photographic collages.

At the core of Walker’s work is the exploration of the individual’s experience within the natural landscape, and the possibilities of communicating that experience visually and through the formalities of language.  “We have come to understand these spaces in a very particular way through the history of painting, literature, and to some extent Hollywood.” says Walker. “My work engages these references, as well as that of Western landscape photography and the role of the photographer in problematizing or romanticizing the West.”

Currently on view at K. Imperial Fine Art is Cusp, new paintings by Lorene Anderson. Anderson has a mastery of layers.  Her works comprise of up to a dozen acrylic paintings on top of one another, each informing the next and each providing a glimpse of its predecessor.  Each layer is a reaction or conversation with the previous layer, showing the history of revision, exploration and repetition in the painting.  Historically, Lorene’s work has touched on themes of shifting space: air currents, the cosmos (spectral analysis/ subatomic particles/ matter), wifi, mobile data, and especially light and sound.  Her work explores what exists between the eye and what is being observed; turning the invisible into something visible.

To see a full selection of works in the show, please visit our website.  The exhibition will be on view online and in the gallery by appointment until March 31.

In addition, we are pleased to present a selection of gallery artists to introduce to 8-bridges: E. Tyler Burton, Melissa Dickenson, Mila Libman, Tahiti Pehrson, Danielle Rante, Erin Vincent, and Samantha Wall.

For 8-bridges, Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present a selection of recent works by Erin Eastabrooks, Belinda Fox, Gregory Hayes, Karl Klingbiel, and Jarek Puczel. The works encapsulate two distinct themes: One touches on the elusive nature of human connection during this challenging time. The other is process-driven abstraction derived from meditations and practices that highlight the push and pull between structure and unpredictability.

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Jud Bergeron titled New Morning, on view from March 11 to May 3, 2021. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. The public is invited to visit the gallery by appointment — please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038 — and online here.

The artist will be present at the gallery on select Saturdays from 1pm to 3pm throughout the course of the exhibition to meet visitors.

Jud Bergeron’s New Morning exhibition is both a survey of ideas the artist has been exploring for the past five years and an introduction of new techniques and mediums born in quarantine. Bergeron’s work tends to be formal in its execution, composition, and presentation, and at the same time conveys a feeling of playful hopefulness. Beginning in March 2020 the uncertainty was palpable and, in addition to the mounting health fears of the global pandemic, there were existential creative fears as well. Bergeron wondered, “Does the work even matter anymore?” After weeks of trying to make sense of the chaos, he went to the studio and, with limited access to materials, made do with what he had–clay and a well appointed silk screen studio. Bergeron spent the next few months making ceramics and experimenting with glazes and, for the artist, it was a liberating feeling to simply explore materiality and process.

Pace Gallery is pleased to present Together: Pacific Time, the debut show by New York-based sculptor Arlene Shechet in Palo Alto. Featuring more than a dozen brilliantly colored ceramic and steel sculptures created by the artist at her studio in the Hudson Valley during the recent period of quarantine, this exhibition demonstrates Shechet’s deep exploration of the power of color during a time of extraordinary upheaval. These sculptures show Shechet—who views color as a lifeforce—creating a livening pulse of highly saturated and tactile works: art as a source of renewed joy and inspiration.

Building upon the unique and technically demanding glazing methods the artist employed for her New York City solo exhibition Skirts at Pace in 2020, Shechet continues to push technical boundaries in this body of work. Sculptures with densely textured surfaces, intimately scaled, are paired with colored steel supports, their evocative forms asking to be examined from multiple angles while promising hidden treasures to be revealed. Painted a bright, acidic yellow, the central gallery’s walls tie the artist’s running theme of the redemptive power of color throughout the entire space, offering an immersive experience for the viewer.

Using a naming system that alludes to the medieval Book of Hours, the works’ titles reflect the marking of time during their creation. Though titled to reflect the passage of time, these sculptures also harness the viewer to the present moment through their seductively vibrant and chromatically rich nature. The painted and powder-coated supports of the works on view are essential to the pieces, expanding beyond a structural role and serving as a further reflection of Shechet’s merging of color and form.

Pamela Walsh Gallery is pleased to present Emotional Abstractions, featuring paintings by Patricia Rubio and Marna Shopoff. Both artists explore abstractions in their work, but through a distinctly different lens. The dialogue between these visual languages helps us define the myriad ways in which one can express life through abstraction. Emotional Abstractions will be on exhibit in the gallery through April 3rd.

Inspired by the vibrancy of her birth city Madrid and the bright colors of San Francisco, Patricia Rubio’s work focuses on geometrical structures. She is interested in the relationship between shapes and colors as they relate to emotions. She creates geometrical constructions as a way to organize her thoughts and memories into compositions that are articulations of her feelings. Each painting is a meditation on how shapes fit together and the potential for each one to form a new mass. Her work is bright, playful and joyous, much like Patricia herself. She begins each work with an emotion or thought which she associates with a color or shape. Rubio’s work becomes a form of visual storytelling as she explores her memories.

Marna Shopoff, an Indianapolis-based painter, blends both contemporary and traditional methods in creating her superbly executed abstract paintings. Fascinated by Phenomenology, the philosophical study of the structures of experience, her canvases fracture space into a complex mosaic of geometric shapes and pulsing color inspired by personal experiences and memories. Marna’s paintings are elegantly structured. Creating depth, balance and motion in the three-dimensional space of her architectural compositions. Unlike many abstract paintings seen today, hers have a focal point that draws the viewer in, allowing you to visually enjoy the whirl of shape and color throughout the transparent, overlapping layers.

For the March edition of 8-bridges, Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to share a suite of new oil on linen paintings by Los Angeles based artist Max Jansons. Featuring dense, saturated color, the works on view oscillate between grand figurative bouquets and abstract geometric details of singular flowers.

Represented since the Ancient Egyptians and still prevalent today, depictions of blossoms and blooms have resonated in art history for centuries. The symbolism of florals is ubiquitous, transcending time, place, content and context.

Jansons’ complex and multi-layered works are elegant and joyful and engage viewers with beauty. His investigation of surface, texture and light through varied and nuanced application of paint is tactile and absorbing. Utilizing linen primed with lead, paints ground in aged oils, pigments whose sources are now extinct, and hand cut tacks, Jansons’ employ of classical materials belies his contemporary result. A keen student of art history, Jansons’ redefines and reinterprets the skills presented by his predecessors and creates an original vision that explores the historical tenets of still life, abstract geometry, light and color.

Inside the gallery is a salon of over 100 local artists creating conversations exploring the intersection of water and land. Currently in our window installation space is a poignant chronicle of the pandemic. Leigh Barbier brings us her world of P.W.D.s (pandemic worry dolls) at the gallery through April 4th, 2021.

The P.W.D.s window installation is accessible 24 hours a day and can also be viewed on our Instagram. The inside of the gallery is open by appointment and can also be viewed by visiting our website and clicking on our remote controlled Gallery Cam.

“I began making Pandemic Worry Dolls in April of this year. By sending them to my close friends, family members and front line workers, it was my way to reach out and offer support and connection in the absence of face to face contact. They are constructed out of cardboard and hot glue, painted with acrylic, further adorned with fabric and found objects. Each one is unique and each one carries a specific worry. The worry is like a prayer, silent and heart felt. I continue to make them in batches of a dozen. And I will keep making them until we can live without fear of the virus. These are a few samples.

I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, California, and grew up on a gravel road, running barefoot and free between neighbor’s homes. I attended a Christian Science church every Sunday and Disneyland once a year. I remember thinking as a small child that Sees candy was a religious destination and God looked like a tube of toothpaste. Later museums replaced Sees candy and I found order in the universe through art. I am drawn to religious art, admire Thomas Hart Benton’s line and color, adore the muralist of the Mexican Revolution and can’t get the images of Disney from my 1960s childhood out of my visual vocabulary.”

— Leigh Barbier