Berggruen Gallery

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Historical Bay Area Painters, a group exhibition showcasing the work of prominent Bay Area artists of the mid-twentieth century. The exhibition will be on view from March 6 through April 24, 2025. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, March 6 from 5 to 7 PM. Exhibiting Artists: Elmer Bischoff | Joan Brown | Richard Diebenkorn | Manuel Neri | Nathan Oliveira | David Park | Paul Wonner Historical Bay Area Painters, a group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper will feature historical artworks by Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Manuel Neri, Nathan Oliveira, David Park, and Paul Wonner. Spanning from Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque, New Mexico (1950) to Nathan Oliveira’s Untitled Seated Figure (1994), the exhibition offers a glimpse into the development of a movement which decisively moved beyond the dominant, nationalist trends of New York’s Abstract Expressionism. Rather than merely returning to figuration, these Post-War painters and teachers, who would come to be known—though often reluctantly—as the Bay Area Figurative School, developed a new style of painting. While drawing on techniques and elements of abstraction, they challenged its hegemonic resistance to subjective and representational forms. By reintroducing recognizable subject matter such as the figure, the still life, and the landscape, the Bay Area Figurative Movement produced a body of work with a generous personal vision; yet the vitality of abstraction remained, evident in bold colors and visceral compositions playing off the physical attributes of Northern California–such as the saturation of a sunset or the illumination of a bather emerging at sea shore. Historical Bay Area Painters includes paintings from Diebenkorn's acclaimed Ocean Park Series—a pivotal moment in his career—where blue hues hint at California’s distinctive light. Similarly, Joan Brown’s monumental eight-foot painting Golden Gate Bridge (1974) boldly captures the iconic bridge’s vermillion tones. David Park, the artist often credited with inaugurating the Bay Area Figurative Movement, is represented by both early (Brush and Comb, 1956) and later (Untitled, Berkeley Figures, 1959) works. Park’s fabled 1949 visit to the Berkeley dump where he destroyed his body of figurative work remains a defining moment of the movement. Berggruen Gallery has a distinguished history of exhibiting and championing the work of acclaimed Bay Area artists. Richard Diebenkorn first exhibited with Berggruen Gallery in 1972, followed by Paul Wonner in 1978, Elmer Bischoff in 1979, and both Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveria, in 1981. Many of the works included in the show are on loan from private collections and have rarely been exhibited to the public.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Contemporary & Modern Masters, a group exhibition showcasing the work of prominent contemporary artists. The exhibition will be on view from March 6 through April 24, 2025. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, March 6 from 5 to 7 PM.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Cohen, an exhibition of recent paintings by California artist Bruce Cohen. This show marks Cohen’s eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 16 through February 27, 2025.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Peter Halley. This show marks Halley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 16 through February 27, 2025. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 16 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Cut, Split, Horizon, an exhibition of new paintings by Heather Day. This show marks the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from August 1 through September 19, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, August 1 from 5 to 7 PM. In her paintings, Heather Day explores landscape, the figure, memory, and sensation through surges of unabashed color, cut and sewn into biomorphic shapes which split and commandeer the canvas. At once harmonious and confrontational, Day’s paintings tangle with the relationship between the material and the conceptual, considering the indescribable phenomena which define our emotional and sensorial perceptions of our surroundings. In some respects a nomadic artist—while Day grew up in Hawaii, she was previously based in Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco, and now lives and works in the Mojave Desert—Day frequently mines her surrounding landscape for artistic inspiration, translating them into flowing washes deliberately arranged to incite the phenomenological experiences offered by these environments, rather than their objective realities. Her paintings simultaneously investigate the relationship between perception and memory through a unique process defined by abstraction and reconstruction. Building on the foundation of pioneering Abstract artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Day’s process relies greatly on the elasticity and malleability of acrylic paint, exploiting its material qualities as a means of expressing emotion and sensation. Often working with acrylic paint at its most fluid, Day pools, washes, sponges, scrubs, and scrapes paint across canvas, before cutting into the surface and stitching the resulting shapes into new arrangements, adjoining the pieces in undulating, curvilinear shapes before affixing the final result to rectangular stretcher bars. This tedious reorganization affords her artworks an infrastructural stability that contrasts with the aqueous spread of the paint, resulting in paintings that are visceral, cerebral, and atmospheric, attenuating the divisions between reality and human perception of reality. Heather Day (b. 1989) received her Bachelor of Fine Art in 2012 from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland where she studied painting and art history. Select solo and group presentations include Almine Rech, Paris (2024), Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023), Art Basel, Miami (2023), The Armory Show, New York (2023), The Pit, Los Angeles (2022), among others. Day’s work has been featured in Art Forum’s must see (2020) and Galerie Magazine’s “Next Big Thing” (2022). Her paintings can be found in collections such as Fort Wayne Museum of Art and The Macedonia Institute. Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon, August 1 – September 19, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Tom McKinley. This show marks the artist's ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from August 1 through September 19, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, August 1 from 5 to 7 PM. Featuring paintings from various series, the works showcased in Tom McKinley depict luxury architecture and idyllic landscapes. Open-air homes adorned with iconic art and designer furniture stand against fields of luscious greenery or endless crystalline seas, demonstrating the artist’s lifelong fascination with contemporary architecture. Devoid of figures, McKinley’s paintings act as celebrations of design and architectural achievement rather than documentation of human habitation. While McKinley’s paintings emphasize the tranquility and harmony generated by precisely arranged interiors and architecture, moments of surrealism and absurdity occasionally arrive unexpectedly, such as the crown in Mid July and the floating moon of Moon on a Lake, showcasing the artist’s imaginative approach to hyperrealism. McKinley’s newest paintings transition from depictions of interiors or architecture into pure landscape. In Morning August 1st, the bows of fifteen boats point toward the open expanse of a body of water as rolling hills drape the scene’s outer edges. A scenic horizon rises above the water, mirroring the pattern of its light. Much like his architectural paintings, Morning August 1st demonstrates a profound talent for creating visual unity that is apparent throughout McKinley’s career, now updated to a include sublime vantage. Tom McKinley was born in Bay City, Michigan and was educated in both the United States and Europe. Beginning at the Goddard Collage in Vermont, he continued his education overseas in England at the Falmouth School of Art in Falmouth, the Ravensbourne College of Art in London, and Brighton Polytechnic in Brighton. McKinley currently lives and works in Oakland, California. Tom McKinley, August 1 – September 19, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present our summer invitational, California Gold, an exhibition that celebrates Californian history, iconography, and culture. The show will be on view from June 20 through July 25, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Thursday, June 20, from 5 to 7 pm. California Gold invites artists with ties to California to engage with the Golden State, expressing a diverse set of viewpoints and relationships. From the Gold Rush to Hollywood opulence to tech booms and busts, California Gold speaks to the state’s status as a cultural center for the United States and beyond, with its rich landscapes entrenched in influential history. The show pays special homage to the contemporary renaissance of San Francisco’s post-pandemic art scene, celebrating the city as a site of artistic optimism and renewal.     Exhibiting Artists:  Tauba Auerbach | John Baldessari | Larry Bell | Helen Berggruen | Sarah Blaustein | Katherine Boxall | Val Britton | Christopher Brown | Andy Burgess | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Adriane Colburn | Travis Collinson | Mark di Suvero | June Edmonds | Charles Gaines | Daniel Gibson | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Michael Gregory | Stephen Hannock | Sarah Hotchkiss | Seth Kaufman | Clare Kirkconnell | Matt Kleberg | Anna Kunz | Charles Lee | Barry McGee | Klea McKenna | Tom McKinley | Richard Misrach | Nicole Mueller | Ed Ruscha | Richard Serra | Jillian Shea | Stephanie H. Shih | Kyle Warren Smith | Joni Sternbach | Marie Thibeault | Dani Tull | Darren Waterston | Griff Williams | Jonas Wood | Christopher Woodcock California Gold, June 20 – July 25, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781- 4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present A Life in Fields, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Darren Waterston. This show marks Waterston’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from May 2 through June 13, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 2, from 5 to 7 PM. The gallery will also host an artist walkthrough on Friday, May 3, at 3 PM. Darren Waterston’s A Life in Fields envisions the landscape genre as an enigmatic investigation of human consciousness. Through symphonic sweeps of color, Waterston creates “devotional” paintings and works on paper that rely on the sublime to survey the human psyche. Each painting embraces the unresolved nature of conscious experience, using color as a stepping stone towards investigating our psychological interiorities.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Polyphonic, a group exhibition of recent works by Minku Kim, Nicole Mueller, and Marie Thibeault. The show will be on view from May 2 through June 13, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Thursday, May 2, from 5 to 7 PM. Taken from the Greek, polyphony means “many sounds,” used in musicology to describe music in which two or more distinct melodies are performed synchronously. Seizing this choral term for the visual arts, Polyphonic unites three contemporary abstract artists—Minku Kim, Nicole Mueller, and Marie Thibeault—to showcase the simultaneously disparate and intersecting dialogues put forth by abstract art, where arrangements of geometry and gesture speak to, and collide at, unique intervals of visual form and discursive intention. The exhibition examines each artists’ work individually and as parts of a orchestral whole, encouraging spectators to link and consider their dynamic relations, paradoxes, and reciprocities. Their concerns are both formal and social: Nicole Mueller’s paintings explore color through prismatic blooms and bursts, placed alongside the delicate stability of Minku Kim’s Sarang series. Meanwhile, Thibeault’s works investigate the tolls of climate change through effusive detonations of color and texture. Together, their works fuse in an astonishing entanglement of beauty, discord, and exegesis.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Straight Loops, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from March 7 through April 25, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 7, from 5:00 to 7:00pm. In Straight Loops, Paul Kremer continues to stretch the bounds of organic form, working against strict definition in visual language or media, and towards a recognition of its inherent fluidity, especially in the abstracted form. This approach reveals the verisimilitude of visual identification between objects, thereby reconfiguring their symbolic and material relationships. Kremer’s process begins with shape rather than subject---this shape is conjured from his imagination, which is continually modeled, formed, and re-formed until Kremer is pleased with the final shape. Once setting the shape, Kremer continues applying and experimenting with color. It is only at the painting’s finish that Kremer titles his work, thus imposing a relation, and identity, onto the painted form.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Architecture in Art, a group exhibition featuring works by Lucy Williams, Tom McKinley, and Bruce Cohen. Architecture in Art will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Abstract Perspectives, a group exhibition that highlights underrepresented voices in the world of contemporary abstract art. Abstract Perspectives will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. This curated collection furthers abstract artwork as a vital means of expression and social commentary beyond representational or stylized subject matter. While the artworks vary widely in size, media, and style, the entire show celebrates abstract art as a resistant break from convention, continually stretching the boundaries of visual language and aesthetics.