Gallery Wendi Norris

“I am trying to do this really basic job of a painter, which is to make images that express something about the present.” — Ranu Mukherjee While many of us have been wondering what to do, Ranu Mukherjee has been very busy in 2020. She has been painting and studying and painting and listening and painting and writing and painting some more. This series of mixed media paintings is a result of all that work, and it represents the full constellation of Ranu’s concerns: ecology, motherhood, and biodiversity; the human body and labor; modernity, climate change, and sacred cultures; the impoverishment of the imagination and the promise of unimagined utopias; feminist futurism and the strength of listening.

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Say My Name, a solo exhibition of new collage works by Ambreen Butt. Say My Name is Butt’s first exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris and her first in San Francisco. Created as a means to explore the relationship between power and vulnerability and to pay homage to innocent lives lost, each of the twelve pieces in Say My Name incorporates the name and age of a single Afghan or Pakistani child killed in U.S. drone strikes. Butt commences by staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out the child’s name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, reconsiders the ripping, tearing action of a drone strike in order to elevate the names of its victims into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength.

Val Britton collects, cuts, paints, pastes, folds, and layers paper. Her practice is fundamentally tactile and reflects a long commitment to her medium. Originally trained as a printmaker, Britton meticulously builds paint and collage layers to create depth in her compositions with contrasting materials and techniques. Impressions of Time, a video recently shot in Britton’s Portland, Oregon studio, provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the making of her newest body of work and the most in-depth look into her process to date. These ten square compositions, part of her decade-long Reverberations series, capture the plurality of her approach to the medium of paper. Britton acts upon her surfaces in dynamic fashion, from the gestural painting and staining process to the meticulous work of cutting shapes out of and into the material. The process becomes a constant negotiation of adding and subtracting in order to both fill space and create it. “The work holds an impression of time, and those layers get built up from back to front,” says Britton. Through a formal language rooted in mapping, including loosely interpreted continents, networks, and constellations, Britton’s visual lexicon is both familiar and illegible. The works, as a result, offer a gesture of invitation without prescribing any particular, worldly destination. “Ultimately, I am trying to make intangible experiences visual through this intense layering and physicality of material.”

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Musical Chairs, an exhibition centered around two rare oil paintings by luminary artist Dorothea Tanning (b. 1910, Galesburg, IL; d. 2012, New York, NY). Five years after featuring in her landmark retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) and the Tate Modern (London, UK), Tanning’s Musical Chairs (1951) and Door 84 (1984) meet again for their inaugural San Francisco display. Exhibiting in the U.S. for the first time in over seventy years, Musical Chairs depicts an adolescent girl sliding off a high-back chair into a cat-like posture, ignoring the swathes of golden cloth subsuming her limbs. These faceted planes of fabric––a signature Tanning motif––juxtaposed with the girl’s composure, evoke the contradictory moods of vigor and serenity. The painting stands out within Tanning’s oeuvre as a convergence of her interests in Gothic literature, designing for ballet productions, and experimenting with abstraction. Created thirty-three years later and more than twice the size of Musical Chairs, Tanning’s Door 84 similarly radiates her iconic yellow palette, though with much more fluid brushstrokes. A distinct example of her fascination with portals, this composition strikingly features an actual door’s edge, echoing the found object assemblages of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Tanning heightens the image’s tension by choreographing two figures blocking one another from getting to the other side of the door. Highlighting the seated figures in both Musical Chairs and Door 84, these paintings playfully hang among unique chairs by Rachel Shillander, Chris Wolston, Arflex, Campagna for Roll & Hill, and Orior, artists represented by leading contemporary design gallery The Future Perfect. The rich and layered textures in Tanning’s paintings play off the textured fabrics and surfaces of the chairs, bridging the modern and the contemporary. Like a game of musical chairs, this staging creates an immersive environment for engaging with Tanning’s work. Musical Chairs is the gallery’s fifth exhibition with Tanning and follows recent major institutional shows recognizing her art historical contributions, including Cecilia Alemani’s 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams (2022) and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (2022–2023), a collaboration between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy) and the Museum Barberini (Potsdam, Germany). Furthermore, a watershed exhibition celebrating Surrealism’s centennial, IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism (2024–2026), will also honor Tanning. On display for two years, this show begins at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels, Belgium), then travels to the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany), the Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid, Spain), and concludes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).

The copper on Earth formed through the explosion of stars, which catapulted the metal onto our planet more than four billion years ago. Using this material from the cosmos, Rohini Devasher (b. 1978, New Delhi, India) adorns copper sheets with markings inspired by astrophotography through interventions like acid washing, embossment, and fumage, or the natural impressions of candle smoke. Devasher's use of this latter technique pays homage to the gallery's modern artist Wolfgang Paalen, who invented fumage in 1936. Intricate and luminous, these works with copper invite close-looking and contemplation. This exhibition is concurrently on view with Devasher’s first U.S. solo institutional exhibition, One Hundred Thousand Suns, at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation at 1201 Minnesota Street.

Gallery Wendi Norris, in collaboration with The Minnesota Street Project Foundation (MSP Foundation), is pleased to announce One Hundred Thousand Suns, Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher’s first U.S. solo exhibition. Her captivating and research-driven body of work chronicles a decade as an eclipse chaser and amateur astronomer. The focal point of the exhibition, the four-channel, 20-minute One Hundred Thousand Suns film will debut simultaneously in three continents: at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India in collaboration with Project 88; at Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, Netherlands; and at MSP Foundation in San Francisco, California. The San Francisco debut of One Hundred Thousand Suns at MSP Foundation will be accompanied by the immersive, site-specific installation Latent Fields. As a counterpoint to this cinematic presentation, Gallery Wendi Norris will concurrently host an intimate show of Devasher’s two-dimensional works on copper at its San Francisco-based headquarters. “Providing a new platform for artists from around the world is an active ethos of the Minnesota Street Project Foundation,” Rachel Sample, Director, Minnesota Street Project Foundation. “Each subsequent exhibition at 1201 Minnesota Street has expanded the geographic scope of artistic voices, and Devashar’s One Hundred Thousand Suns is the perfect next stop on our international journey.” Within MSP Foundation’s state-of-the-art screening gallery, Devasher’s One Hundred Thousand Suns film explores four distinct dimensions of the Sun: material, ephemeral, personal, and historical. Driven by more than 157,000 portraits of our nearest star, observed over 120 years, this audio-visual work centers on the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India, where every day since 1901 staff have recorded images of the Sun. Through the Observatory’s archival material, combined with public-domain images from NASA and the artist’s own data—photographs, drawings, videos, and interviews with eclipse chasers—Devasher examines the complexities of observational astronomy and the ways in which ‘seeing’ is strange, wondrous, and more ambiguous than one might imagine. Suspended from MSP Foundation’s towering vaulted ceiling, Devasher’s installation Latent Fields envelops visitors with expansive digitally-printed fabrics on which the subatomic and the stellar collide. Devasher prints images and drawings of fast-charged particles and distant celestial bodies imbuing their silk material with the mesmerizing sheen of copper. A crossing through the body of a star: from the sub atomic to the atmospheric, Latent Fields is a coalescence of material, visibility, scale, and temporality. An exhibition at the Gallery Wendi Norris headquarters will focus on Devasher’s Sol Drawings, a series of embellished copper sheets. Once forged in massive stars, the Earth inherited copper from the universe more than four billion years ago. Transformed through interventions like fumage, acid wash, and embossment, these intricate and luminous panels invite close-looking and contemplation. One Hundred Thousand Suns is free and open to the public.

Gallery Wendi Norris is delighted to present Lay Bare My Arms, Ambreen Butt’s first in-person solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring eight new meticulously painted and collaged works, this exhibition coincides with the release of Butt’s first monograph, What Comes to My Lips. Lay Bare My Arms foregrounds Butt’s perspective as a woman and a mother, processing the consequences of political stagnation and gun violence in America. Combining the radiant aesthetics of South Asian miniature paintings with the democratic nature of collage, Butt adorns her paintings with textual fragments from the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, an artistic interpretation that questions how the law is changed within and by society. A central work in this exhibition, Guardians of Safe Heavens, features two figures that resemble demons. One holds a pistol, symbolizing the ever-present threat of violence that can disrupt the sanctity of life. The other cradles a walking iris, whose ephemeral bloom lasts only one day, emphasizing the fragility of existence. Though these creatures suggest potential danger, they are also engagingly rendered, inviting viewers to contemplate the delicate balance between safety and risk in today's time. This work, along with the other seven pieces of Lay Bare My Arms, asks the fundamental question, where are the safe spaces for the most vulnerable? Rather than inciting a political call to action, Butt positions herself as a witness and record-keeper. Lay Bare My Arms, like her previous Say My Name series, prompts viewers to consider the realities of those afflicted by violence, going beyond the role of a news consumer with the privilege of distance from lived violence.

The themes and concerns alive in the work of Ranu Mukherjee and Alice Rahon cross generational boundaries and offer viewers the opportunity to consider ideas rooted in nature, materiality, and transcendence. Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors presents artworks that examine issues of migration and identities, our changing landscapes and environmental concerns, across history and into the future. On view in New York City September 6 - October 7, 2023 at 529 West 20th Street on the ground floor, the exhibition includes approximately 20 mixed media artworks spanning the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, depicting how both artists innovate across media to further investigate their themes. “Beyond presenting the work of two artists who I admire and am proud to represent,” said Wendi Norris, “Time Warriors invites audiences to explore the way their work, from different perspectives and across generations, shares ideas and themes as an open conversation. It is striking how both Rahon and Mukherjee experienced a world in immense turmoil and have harnessed this energy to create deeply poetic and personal explorations of time and expression.” In the case of Rahon (b. Chenecey-Buillon, France, 1904; d. Mexico City, 1987), she utilizes sand and the earth as well as found objects in many of her compositions, and famously refers to herself as "a cave painter," having delved back in time and through her experiences with indigenous cultures in Mexico to render uniquely timeless, stylistic compositions. Mukherjee (b. Boston, 1966) similarly explores the changing environments. Using the forest as a means of expressing connection with nature and time, she innovatively prints present day mass media images from climate change and feminist protests onto jamdani sari fabrics that are collaged into her paintings, often appearing as hybrid or invented groves of banyan, aspen, or black cherry trees. Both artists take inspiration from India, Indian culture, and concepts of being and time. Rahon’s first volume of poetry was published in 1936 upon her return from a sojourn in India with fellow poet and artist, Valentine Penrose. Many of her poems and paintings address nature and mysticism, as well as the duality and union of humanity and nature. Mukherjee draws from her ancestry in India, poetically utilizing sari cloths as her canvas, investigating the transformation of its material as well as the multiplicity of ideas in her layered images. Rahon once described a process of hers as “a type of enchantment, like the development of photos in a tray—little by little, the forms emerge.” Likewise, Mukherjee utilizes a layered process of printing on textiles and then putting them down in the color fields. “While my compositions are very planned out, it is also like printing in a darkroom and watching the image emerge,” says Mukherjee. “The chemistry between the printed patterns and the fabric and then the colors and images in paint is really exciting and the process often seems magical.” Time Warriors is on view September 6 - October 7, 2023 at Gallery Wendi Norris, 529 West 20th Street ground floor, New York City.

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Leo Marz’s Modern Office. For his debut at Gallery Wendi Norris and first U.S. solo show in over a decade, Mexican artist Leo Marz investigates humans as processors of information. The seven new paintings and two sculptures in this exhibition, which evoke modern offices, address the flux, fragmentation, and discontinuities of space and time inherent in contemporary life. Each painting begins with a series of quick observational sketches. Drawing upon his imagination, intuition, and sense of humor, the artist combines elements from multiple sources as he develops the work. Modern Office addresses both temporal and spatial complexities. Lines may offer perspectival cues or suggest overlapping objects or gestures. Playing with scale, Marz layers compositions within compositions, bending space and time. Hats, decorative objects, and fragments of human bodies are ghostly presences in complex office spaces. Planes intersect in irrational ways. Abstraction coexists with representation. Interiors mingle with exteriors, present with past. Marz speaks to what we are conscious of, yet may not fully comprehend, as we navigate work life and home life, often simultaneously.

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Remedios Varo: Encuentros, the Spanish artist’s second solo gallery exhibition since her death in 1963. With approximately twelve works on display, Remedios Varo: Encuentros explores Varo’s engagement with the unexpected. A decade after organizing the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition (Indelible Fables, 2012), Gallery Wendi Norris is thrilled to deepen its commitment to the work of Remedios Varo, a vitally important modernist and pioneer of a feminist Surrealism. “This exhibition presents a rare and extraordinary opportunity to view powerful and awe-inspiring works by Remedios Varo, an imaginative artist whose mastery puts her in the ranks of the greatest painters of the 20th century,” states Wendi Norris, Varo’s gallerist and market expert. The exhibition takes its name from one of Varo’s signature paintings, Encuentro (1959). In this composition, a woman in a watery blue dress sits at a table and opens a box from which her own face stares back at her. Varo’s visual imagination is replete with such uncanny encounters: chance meetings between two beings, confrontations with the self, entanglements with the cosmos, brushes with the unknown. In each piece in the exhibition, the natural laws of the universe are suspended. Remedios Varo: Encuentros features paintings from throughout the artist’s career, including her last painting Naturaleza muerta resucitando (1963). In this wry take on the still life tradition, the objects are anything but still. Varo creates a dynamic vegetal solar system in which levitated fruits orbit a lighted candle, leaving trails of cosmic dust in their wake. Also on view is the haunting Ruptura (1955), a painting with the air of mystery for which Varo is famous. Rarely exhibited works on paper, like La torre (1947) and Apártalos que voy de paso (1959), offer viewers opportunities to experience other facets of the artist’s technical mastery and fantastical vision. Remedios Varo is achieving widespread institutional recognition. The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Toledo Museum of Art have all recently acquired Varo artworks from Gallery Wendi Norris. Her work was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, as well as in the recent exhibitions Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice) and the Museum Barberini (Potsdam), and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and Tate Modern (London). It is currently on view in Third Eye: The Costantini Collection in Malba at Fundación Malba (Buenos Aires). Varo will be the subject of the forthcoming exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, from July 29 to November 27, 2023, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in 23 years.

Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons addresses issues of history, memory, gender and religion through her work; she investigates how each one of these themes informs identity. Campos-Pons employs painting, installation, performance, video and photography to create autobiographical works that invite close examination and consideration. Marking the 20th Anniversary of Gallery Wendi Norris and inaugurating their new headquarters at 436 Jackson Street, Finding Balance is the second solo presentation for Campos-Pons with the gallery. The exhibition borrows its name from Campos-Pons's monumental 28-panel multimedia masterwork, which is the centerpiece of the show. The exhibition will focus on Campos-Pons's large-format polaroid works, including a complementary array of multi-paneled works that have never been shown by the gallery.

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Uncovering Alice Rahon, the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in over forty-five years. With seventeen works on display, Uncovering Alice Rahon reveals Rahon’s mastery of oil and sand painting, assemblage, and sculpture. Her art has not been shown in San Francisco since 1953, when the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) presented a Rahon solo show. Almost seventy years later, Uncovering Alice Rahon underscores Rahon’s contemporary relevance and deepens Gallery Wendi Norris’ commitment to advancing the work of this remarkable artist, who was brought into the gallery’s program three years ago.

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Three Fates, featuring works by artists Ambreen Butt, Chitra Ganesh, and Eva Schlegel at Fort Mason Center Pier 2 in San Francisco. Three Fates will be the seventh exhibition in the gallery’s innovative offsite exhibition model. In ancient cultures across the globe, Fate was understood as a cosmic force that existed beyond the control of human activity. For the Greeks, it was personified by three women so powerful that even the Olympian deities were subject to their decisions. Clotho (from whose name the English word “cloth” is derived) would spin the thread of an individual’s life. Lachesis would measure and allot it; finally Atropos—the inflexible one, the oldest of the three—would cut it, thus determining the moment of death. As we reflect on the past year and prepare to enter a new one, beset by global powers so vast (political, medical, economic, climatological) as to feel impersonal in their reach, Gallery Wendi Norris presents the work of three artists whose diverse experience and work examine, reflect, and reckon with the vexing problems and delightful possibilities that Fate provides. Three Fates is an opportunity to reconsider in the present moment the primeval concept of Fate, as well as the role it may (or may not) play in our individual and collective lives.

Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, 926 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, May 23 — June 29, 2019, photography: Dan Bradica In the first New York solo exhibition in 22 years for the late artist, Gallery Wendi Norris presents "Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg." Gathering four decades of painting and sculpture, a new curatorial direction will present her visionary perspective from a contemporary vantage point, advancing the examination of Carrington's ecofeminist worldview. More than 20 paintings and six sculptures by the British-born Mexican-exile will coalesce to explore Carrington's personal philosophy as it's depicted through a vast visual vocabulary forged from her encyclopedic knowledge of ancient myth and religion. Through the creative and often comical overlapping of esoteric references, Carrington demonstrates a primordial wisdom fundamentally the same across all cultures. Recognizing a universal interconnectedness we do not yet understand, Carrington's imagery evokes the salvatory power of feminism, ecology, and mysticism in the face of mankind's destructive dominance over nature. "Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg," derives its title from a play Carrington wrote in 1970 in which a profit-driven apocalypse has killed all the women except for one, a "colossally fat old lady of 80, the ex-madam of a brothel," who comes to possess the last hope, symbolized in the form of an egg. Throughout the exhibition the egg reoccurs as a symbol for fertility and the universe, which to Carrington were one and the same. "The Egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small," Carrington wrote in Down Below (1943), a memoir of her experience in a Spanish Sanatorium. This exhibition chronologically begins with the painting Down Below (1940), a visual representation of the same experience, and spans the evolution of Carrington's ecofeminist perspective as the scope of her artistic attention widens from her own inner-experience to the all-encompassing One. Wendi Norris and her gallery have been working with Leonora Carrington’s artwork and legacy for 17 years. Her art has been featured in over 80 exhibitions around the world and she is represented in the museum collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She published seven works of fiction, all of which have been reissued after her death with resurging popularity. She died in 2011 at the age of 94.

Yamini Nayar: If stone could give, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, 3344 24th Street, San Francisco, CA, February 21 — March 30, 2019, photography: John Wilson White / Studio Phocasso “If stone could give” explores the fundamental intersection of sculpture and photography in Nayar’s artistic practice. Bearing strong reference to both Modernist architectural structures, informal building strategies and corporeal forms, the works invite viewers into distinctly psychological environments. Nayar’s compositions draw visually on the relationships between architecture and the body, and the cultural, emotional and spatial resonance of our constructed surroundings. Like the exhibition’s title, “If stone could give”, the works on view blur the boundary between animate gestures and inanimate constructs. Within her studio, Nayar builds her sculptural subjects from simple materials - cardboard, plaster, house paint, wood, string, cut paper and photographs, and other industrial materials and studio debris. Nayar documents the process of construction and deconstruction in hundreds of film and digital photographs. Ultimately, she creates a single photographic image as the only relic of the tableaux. The laborious process of building and unbuilding remains only in memory and metaphor as she destroys the sculpture to start anew. Nayar describes her work as “exploring psychological relationships to the built environment, the tensions between planned and informal architectures, memory and erasure, material and psychic spaces.” The exhibition presents large and medium-scale photographs mounted on Dibond and frameless, leaning or hanging on supports within the environment. The presentation invites the viewer into a space of process and further blurs the lines between object and image. “If stone could give” is Gallery Wendi Norris’ fifth offsite exhibition and is presented at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco. Built in 1924, the building boasts classic San Francisco architectural elements, including a small un-finished basement characterized by low ceilings and exposed framework. Like Nayar’s artworks, the space boasts juxtaposing characteristics of refined and raw, light-filled and cavernous, new and old. At the heart of the Mission District, the exhibition is adjacent nearby cultural institutions including the The 500 Capp Street Foundation, Kadist Foundation, Galería de la Raza, The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, The Women’s Building, Ratio 3 Gallery, Et Al. Gallery, and more.

Ana Teresa Fernández: Of Bodies and Borders, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, 6391 NW Second Avenue, Miami, FL, November 2 - December 8, 2018, photography: Sergi Alexander / Eyeworks Production Since 2014, close to 120,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Central Mediterranean departing from Libya, Tunisia or Egypt on the route known as the “deadliest border in the world”. To date, according to the New York Times, 13,000 migrants have been recorded as killed or missing on this border. Once saturating the North American news, this crisis has been distilled to the periphery of our awareness. For Ana Teresa Fernández’s third solo exhibition, “Of Bodies and Borders”, Fernández aims to refocus attention on the plight of the thousands of migrants through a new body of work, including video, painting, drawing, and installation. Pivoting from her previous work on U.S./Mexico border to the Mediterranean Sea, this five-year project was filmed in various locations off the island of Poros, Greece. All of the works in the exhibition stem from Fernández’s performance in the depths of the ocean. In the video, “Drawn Below”, she dons her signature little black dress and heels, weighted down with 13-pound weights. While submerged, she wrestles with a bed sheet for hours, exemplifying an enduring physical and psychological performance. Her large-scale documentary oil paintings illustrate her suspended underwater: swimming, floating, and plummeting into a dark, eerie abyss. The meticulous layering of color and brushwork further emphasize the complexity and tension between water, cloth, and the artist’s body. In the series of documentary drawings titled, “Gauging Gravity”, Fernández’s identity is eventually erased, only recognized by bodily fragments inside a void. This new work observes what exists within liminal spaces, seeking what is lost in the margins, between light and shadow, positive and negative space, heavy and buoyant, seen and unseen. Fernández seeks to champion the invisible, unrecognized, undervalued, and in danger of sinking into oblivion. As Gallery Wendi Norris’ fourth off-site exhibition and Fernández’s east coast debut, “Of Bodies and Borders” will be presented in a non-profit space in Miami, FL, in the vibrant arts community of Little Haiti, also known as “the U.S. cultural heart of the Haitian diaspora”. The neighborhood parallels histories of migration, particularly the Haitian refugees during the late 1970s to early 1990s, and builds upon Fernández’s 2006 public artwork and activism in Haiti. Moreover, the site presents a unique opportunity to work with an art non-profit whose program serves the local intergenerational arts community. The exhibition will travel to the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University in January 2019. Indiana University will publish a book in November, to be released in Miami, featuring an essay by María Elena Ortíz, Associate Curator at the Peréz Art Museum Miami.

Broken Lines, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Curatorial Project in collaboration with ISAIA and Whitewall Magazine, 140 Maiden Lane, San Francisco, CA Gallery Wendi Norris, in collaboration with Whitewall Magazine and ISAIA, proudly presents Broken Lines, a curated exhibition within Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic San Francisco landmark, 140 Maiden Lane. Constructed in 1948, Wright’s euphoric, cylindrically-oriented setting gives way to contemporary notions of borders, beautiful decay, and playful uses of art media as modes of contemplation. Art works by gallery artists Julio César Morales, Yamini Nayar, Miguel Angel Ríos, Eva Schlegel, and Peter Young elegantly punctuate the space with both confrontational and congruous gestures. Eva Schlegel’s site-specific mirror installation greets the viewer upon entry, presenting an infinite reflection of Wright's signature cylindrical lines. Nayar’s large scale photo, "Transference", reveals a Brutalist architectural approach, with complete regard for function over form, a stark contrast to that of Wright’s. Ríos’s “Piedras Blancas” photo documentation, hysterically depicts a grouping of thousands of handmade clay balls from his critically-acclaimed film which serves as a metaphor for human and drug trafficking. Morales’ “Broken Line”, a red neon drawing of the US/Mexico border is installed across from his life-sized silver ceramic "Wetback Burrito" sculptures, a captivating, radiant manifestation of a socio-political hotspot. Finally, Young’s Weave acrylic paintings on canvas and paper from the 1970s masterfully reference the weave, a nod to the exquisite ISAIA line.

Eric Siemens, A Settle in the Cornice Downs, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 144 inches (182.9 x 365.8 cm) Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to announce its third off-site exhibition, Raveling Relic, featuring new paintings by Eric Siemens. The exhibition will take place in the 10,000 square foot atrium of 555 20th Street, Building 113, in the Historic Pier 70 in San Francisco. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a contribution by Kevin Killian, celebrated poet and writer, winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award and the 2009 American Book Award. Raveling Relic marks the solo debut exhibition for Eric Siemens, who was formerly represented by Gallery Wendi Norris as part of the collaborative artist duo Kate Eric. These thirteen new paintings represents a long journey of return to painting, after a nearly five-year hiatus, an untangling of revered images and ideas stowed away in the artist’s mind. Currently residing in Camogli, a small fishing village on Italy’s Ligurian coast, Siemens pulls from a pre-existing nautical language to aid his conceptual navigation. His lexicon originates from old world cartographic charts, specifically Portolan Charts or Ex-voto paintings, which operate as historical anchors. Siemens’s mental excavation simultaneously venerates and questions the veracity of these artistic paradigms. Siemens’s paintings feature elusive landscapes with abstract backgrounds that leave the viewer disoriented, yet awestruck. Scenes range from apparitional figures that flit against the thick, impasto foreground to sharp landmasses that dissipate and reemerge at different angles. The work harkens back to fifteenth century shipwreck paintings but uses surreal color palettes and expressive washes of acrylic paint. The installation of the artworks will conceptually mimic the psychological journey represented. Gallery Wendi Norris will construct an intimate sculptural installation environment, enhancing the dramatic interplay of light and shadow, while embracing the grandiose architecture of the building’s atrium. This site-specific exhibition appropriates the 10,000 square foot atrium within the 20th Street Buildings at the Historic Pier 70. Building 113 was designed by civic engineer D. E. Melliss in 1885 and previously housed the Machine Shop. Located on the San Francisco waterfront, Pier 70 is comprised of eight historic office and industrial buildings known as the Union Iron Works which served for 150 years contributing to the industrialization of the west coast and both World Wars. The renovation of the building, led by Orton Development, preserves the site’s history and repurposes the space for a community of modern, innovative companies. The site was chosen for its intersection between past and present, honoring the city’s maritime past, while also revitalizing the space for future arts and culture events.

Val Britton: The Shape of Change, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Curatorial Project, Hired Commission, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA, April 10 - 14, 2018 SAN FRANCISCO -- March 27, 2018 -- In honor of Equal Pay Day 2018, Gallery Wendi Norris has partnered with Hired, a career marketplace that matches tech talent with the world’s most innovative companies, to present a curated project that will foster creative problem solving and dialogue around wage inequality. The Shape of Change presents a commissioned body of work by San Francisco-based artist Val Britton, curated in direct response to Hired’s 2018 report, The State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace, which calculates current trends in tech salaries. Last year's data found that 63% of the time, women received lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company — and the forthcoming report will further evaluate the state of wage inequality today between men and women in the technology field. The installation will transform the atrium at Minnesota Street Project with two mixed media paintings on paper and a sculptural installation made up of cut paper and string. The work stems from Britton’s interpretation of the statistical analyses that become transmuted into visual elements, i.e. shapes, forms, and colors. She extracts ratios and statistics from the report to be converted into concrete masses. These abstract, geometric visual elements are imbued with Hired’s report data, yet remain open for audiences to explore a multitude of potential meanings. It will be on display April 9 - 14. Britton creates a material representation of the state of wage inequality to be corporeally understood and acknowledged. Her work allows the data to take shape and occupy space, engaging the viewer’s visceral response in hopes of changing the way we move through our current socio-economic environment. Coinciding with Equal Pay Day on April 10, 2018, The Shape of Change shines a light on the state of wage inequality across the technology industry. Gallery Wendi Norris selected Minnesota Street Project, a prominent art space in San Francisco, as the site for the installation in the interest of collaborating with the local arts community, and bringing this important campaign to a space that has developed its mission around supporting the arts and artists in the Bay Area.

Julio César Morales: This World is Not For You, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, Torre Cube, Floor 13, Guadalajara, Mexico, February 2 - 28, 2018 San Francisco, November 20, 2018 — From the first barb wire fence placed in the Southwest region to deter the Chinese after the Chinese exclusion Act in the 1880’s, to Trump’s proposed 70 billion-dollar wall, the physical border between Mexico and the United States has been highly debated. For his inaugural gallery exhibition in Mexico, Morales examines the history of the border wall in a new series of experimental landscapes in video, photographs, and watercolors. Morales has been researching and chronicling activities along the border for more than two decades and has amassed an archive of over 800 news stories that detail absurd, atrocious and inventive stories of activities along the border. These headlines are brought to the surface through text-based watercolors, or his ongoing “Narco Headlines” series. A new, 19-piece series entitled “Day Dreaming” mixes black and white photographs of the US/Mexico Border wall with geometric abstractions in which the color fields derive from sampled items of abandoned trash, shoes, clothing and drinking vessels from both sides of the border. The photographs are printed to the same size as the holes that are left at certain areas along the fence for surveillance. The art works attempt to find beauty in the everyday struggles and reality of migration, self-determination and social equality. A larger-scaled, four-panel piece, Cuatro Caminos, was shot along The Devil’s Highway, a prehistoric and colonial trail through the Sonora Desert in Arizona, known as the deadliest region of the continent—a desert so harsh and desolate that even Border Patrol is afraid to travel through it. Native Americans from that region say it has been cursed for hundreds of years and stories about men, women and children being swallowed by the ghosts/devils under the sand is still talked about today. The area is dangerous and no border wall exists –an invitation for migrants to attempt crossing in a place where their odds of survival are slim. We Are The Dead and We Are the Dead: Part Two, a two channel video installation with original soundtracks by the artist, are based on a true story from the 1990’s in which two brothers crossed the Sonora Desert from Mexico into Arizona. Lost and out of water, they are left only with two bottles of tequila meant as a gift for relatives waiting in the US. The brothers later decided to split up and find help, and one made it to a Circle K convenience store, while the other was later found dead in the desert with an empty bottle of tequila. A story originally told of the dead brother in 2013 in We Are the Dead is now continued through the eyes of the living brother in We are the Dead, Part Two, where the living brother states. Since my brother is gone, I no longer speak Spanish. That world left us, dehydrated. We saw planes taking flight, running away. This world is not for you they were telling us in their lift off. Do you still believe the world is for you? Gallery Wendi Norris presents its fourth exhibition for Morales at Galería Curro’s project space at Torre Cube, the 230-foot tower building, designed by architect Carme Pinós, in the heart of Puerta de Hierro, Guadalajara, Mexico. The building is situated in an area of high seismic intensity, defining the concrete materiality of the building, with sculpturally stunning design, made of airy terraces opening to a large, exposed silo-style center, taking advantage of the local climate. The exhibition is accompanied by limited edition artist poster, with an essay by Diana Nawi, an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles, who previously served as associate curator at the Perez Art Museum Miami.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: If I Were A Poet, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, 649 Mason Street, San Francisco, CA, January 11 - 28, 2018, photography: Maciek Janicki San Francisco, November 15, 2017 — Cuban-born artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons addresses the unique and resilient nature of the Afro Cuban diaspora through photography, sculpture, performances, and video installations. Her West Coast debut and first exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris, presents works ranging from 1990 to 2017, including three major installations, rare large-format Polaroid photographs, and a performance work. Among the significant works in the exhibition are gridded variations of large-format Polaroid photographs depicting ancestral, totemic and futuristic themes ranging from the slave trade to migration. Polaroid manufactured only four large-format cameras and they have been used by very few artists, including Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter and William Wegman. The company ended production of the film in 2017 making existing works increasingly rare. If I Were a Poet features several works from international museum exhibitions. Matanzas Sound Map, a sound and glass sculptural installation, debuted at Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and will be part of her upcoming retrospective at the National Museum of Fine Art in Havana in 2019. Another video and sound piece, Meanwhile the Girls were Playing, has been shown at the Frist Center at Vanderbilt, Spelman College, in Atlanta, and Smith College, in Northampton, MA. Another highlight of the show is the performance work titled Remedios, in which Campos-Pons negotiates narratives of pain, loss and resilience while imagining herself in a time of societal and geopolitical transition. During her singular meditation on survival, the artist wears a costume that she designed and made by hand. Remedios has been performed at the New Museum in New York and at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Campos-Pons will perform Remedios at 6 pm on January 11, 2018 at Building 649. This exhibition in the Presidio of San Francisco, a national park at the Golden Gate, utilizes raw spaces in historic Building 649 at Crissy Field. The building was constructed in 1951 by the United States Army to house the Sixth Army’s US Army Reserve Center. The 6,000 square foot interior features a large assembly hall surrounded by storage space, classrooms, and a rifle range. When the Presidio was a military base, Building 649 was used for training and administrative activities. In April 1975, thousands of Bay Area volunteers worked at the building when it was being used for the medical care of more than fifteen hundred children who had been hastily airlifted from Vietnam as Saigon fell. The children were ultimately relocated for adoption with American families in a program called Operation Babylift.

Leonora Carrington, Operation Wednesday, 1969, Tempera on masonite, 23 ¾ x 17 5/8 inches (60.5 x 44.7 cm) Gallery Wendi Norris’ final exhibition at 161 Jessie Street, Threads of Memory: One Thousand Ways of Saying Goodbye, presents a celebratory survey of the gallery’s program, including emblematic works by each of the 18 represented artists. The exhibition highlights the rigorous and richly varied artworks that anchor the gallery’s transcultural approach, while tracing threads of influence and connection between the artists. Leonora Carrington’s Operation Wednesday (1969), an exquisitely rendered canvas commemorating and mourning students who were killed in violent uprisings in Mexico in 1968, is juxtaposed by Ana Teresa Fernández’ new small canvases from her Erasure series, paintings that document a performance by the artist to honor the 43 students who were unjustly killed as a way to silence their protests in a more recent 2014 tragedy. Firelei Báez’ Study for Flight No.1 (archived, the order of Anacaona) (2017) is juxtaposed with Dorothea Tanning’s 1960 oil, Visite jaune (Visite éclair), two paintings that strike a deft balance between abstraction and figuration. Also on view are video works by Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee and Miguel Angel Ríos, experimental photographs by Christine Elfman, Chris Fraser, Yamini Nayar, and Eva Schlegel, paintings on canvas by Marcel Jean, Wolfgang Paalen and Peter Young, and a precious wooden object by Remedios Varo. The show’s title is derived from Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ largest installation, Threads of Memory: One Thousand Ways of Saying Goodbye (2003), an immersive mixed media work that, as poetically described by curator and scholar Sally Berger, “is a metaphor for moving away from one thing and toward another”. With this exhibition, we invite our community to celebrate the program we have built here at 161 Jessie Street, the artists that propel us forward, and the exciting path ahead as we embark on a new focus, new program, and new headquarters. In lieu of an opening reception, Gallery Wendi Norris will host a champagne celebration to close the exhibition on Wednesday, November 15, from 6-8pm, accompanied by a curated playlist by gallery artist and DJ, Peter Young (DJ Joven).

Yorgo Alexopoulos: Drifting on a Memory, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, CA, September 21 — October 14, 2018, photography: Bryan Hewitt San Francisco — Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Yorgo Alexopoulos: Drifting on a Memory, the Los Angeles-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Drifting on a Memory debuts large-scale oil paintings and works on paper that mark a conceptual voyage into the artist’s past. Departing from his decades-long practice of creating video installations built-up from hundreds of original paintings, drawings, and photographs rendered into digital compositions, Drifting on a Memory marks Alexopoulos’ return to oil painting, a medium he has consistently utilized behind the scenes of these iconic moving image works in various, subtle ways. Having relocated to his hometown of Los Angeles after living in New York City for over twenty years, Alexopoulos revisits the landscapes—both real and remembered—that mark the brief time spent with his father, who died prematurely when the artist was just seven years old. Continuing his exploration of the universality of landscape symbols and archetypes, Alexopoulos roots his new paintings firmly in the private, emotional realm of his own memory. As such, he reveals a stripped-down, “unplugged,” and deeply personal narrative thread in his ongoing artistic journey.

(ism): 80 Years of Nonconformity, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, July 13 - September 15, 2018, photography: Hewitt Photography Gallery Wendi Norris presents new and never-before-exhibited modern and contemporary artworks by Firelei Baez, Chitra Ganesh, Yamini Nayar, Wolfgang Paalen, Eva Schlegel, Dorothea Tanning and Peter Young. Spanning the years 1935 – 2017, the careful selection of works represent important art historical moments of the last 80 years, while never fitting neatly or distinctly within their respective categorical ‘boxes’. The presentation will weave together early perspectives of Paalen on the spirituality of abstraction from the 1930s, with the whimsy-infused formalism of Young that emerged in the 1970s and the sculptural photo explorations of Yamini Nayar; simultaneously, Tanning’s kaleidoscopic 1960s abstractions that subtly suggest human form, with the bold, mythological feminist figures of Chitra Ganesh and Firelei Báez.

Ranu Mukherjee: Shadowtime, 2017, installation view, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, May 18 - July 8, 2017, photography: JKA Photography San Francisco — Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Shadowtime, the third solo exhibition with San Francisco-based multi-media artist Ranu Mukherjee. Shadowtime unveils a series of new yellow, orange, and purple milk paintings on paper and a hybrid film installation, projected on a 107 x 60-inch sculptural glass screen. The paintings, varying in scale from intimate to larger-than-life, debut a new style of mark making for Mukherjee. The brightly colored and near-abstract compositions incorporate layers of gestural lines evoking immediacy and movement. At first glance, the paintings appear as collections of colorful fragments. Made up of seemingly knotted entanglements, they deny the viewer immediate comprehension of specific subject matter. However, from vibrant tangles and clusters, narrative and contradicting imagery unfolds. Scenes of lovers embracing, ice sheets cracking, and masses of people in protest or prayer reveal themselves with relatable complexity. This exhibition will also introduce the artist’s newest hybrid film installation, Mixing Dusts. As artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Mukherjee recorded pairs of participants rolling on the ground while hugging. This action, both difficult and intimate, describes movement and love in an unsteady world. This footage, animated atop fragments of shifting groundcover, portrays expressions of love made incongruous by an underlying sense of apocalypse and uncertainty. In order to capture the feeling of being a multi-racial artist in a precarious environment, Mukherjee collaborated with the Bureau of Linguistic Reality to coin the term, “Shadowtime”. “Shadowtime” conveys “the feeling of living simultaneously in two distinctly different time scales.” An additional definition is “the acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.” “Shadowtime” becomes a noun about unknowing. It expresses the cognitive dissonance of equally possible yet divergent futures. Layering images of natural disasters and exodus the artist personalizes incomprehensible fear with undeniable notions of hope and love. This exhibition is complemented by two public programs including an artist conversation lead by with Saisha Grayson, Ph.D. candidate, The Graduate Center-CUNY, and former Assistant Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition closing reception features Now not Now, a newly commissioned dance performance by Hope Mohr Dance. Inspired by physical movement, Mukherjee invited Hope Mohr Dance to create and premiere a new movement-based performance for three people, inspired by and based on the Shadowtime exhibition.