Greg Kucera Gallery

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our eleventh one-person exhibition of work by Seattle artist, Peter Millett. Welded in steel, the recent sculptures are powder coated in a a series of subdued grey and silvers. Millett continues to explore the flip side of the mass and weight of his work in Corten steel. This work embraces open shapes having less sense of mass or weight; no inside or outside, just pure gesture. In contrast to the bursts of color he employed in his 2020 exhibition, this collection of sculptures exists in a much more subdued color scheme. The muted tones reference shadow, reflections, and moonlight. Silver, white, and varying shades of grey, create an exhibition that is calm and reflective. The triangular components that serve as the the sculptural building blocks twist and turn, folding in upon each other in quiet meditation. This exhibition is in conjunction with the artist’s retrospective, Peter Millett: Building Forms, showing at Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, WA, October 12, 2024 - January 12, 2025. The exhibition is the artist’s first museum survey, presenting artworks from Northwest private and museum collections in a review of Millett’s expansive body of work. An accompanying catalog of the exhibition will also be available with an introduction by MoNA Executive Director and Chief Curator, Stefano Catalani, and an essay by Greg Bell, the curator of the exhibition. BIOGRAPHY Peter Millett was born in 1949 in Evanston, IL and resides in Seattle. He received his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA at University of Washington. His work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond; Tacoma Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The artist lives and works in Seattle.

The Gallery is excited to present our ninth one-person exhibition by Washington artist Claudia Fitch. The show’s title, Models and Messengers, refers to how we choose to present ourselves in our public life. We are models, walking the city streets like a runway, wearing our chosen patterns and designs. We are also messengers, using the clothes we wear to convey information about ourselves. “As if in an imaginary city center, stepping out on the street with bright plumage and sartorial flair, they are bearing messages, both personal and public. The figures are also shaped by selected images from the media stream. Human life on the street can be simultaneously ubiquitous and monumental, contemporary and ancient.” –Claudia Fitch The exhibition’s centerpiece is a 10 foot by 10 foot neon hummingbird, a prototype for a public sculpture commissioned for the Lynnwood City Center Rail Station. Based on the beautiful Anna’s Hummingbird, common to the Pacific Northwest, the sculpture’s neon lights mimic the bird’s iridescent feathers and jewel-like appearance. Biography Fitch received her BFA in painting from the University of Washington, Seattle and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. The artist was awarded the 2014 Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. In 2011, the WSU Museum of Art produced a major one-person show of her work. In 2012, she had a one-person show at Portland Art Museum as a part of the APEX Gallery series. Past honors include the Art + Architecture Fellowship at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and a NEA Fellowship in Visual Arts in Sculpture. Her 1995 one-person exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum was an exploration of the relationship between architecture and the theme of gardens and topiary. Fitch has produced large-scale public commissions for the First Hill Streetcar and CenturyLink Field. She has exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, as well as a number of university and gallery spaces across the country. Her work is included in several important collections including the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Arts Commission, Spokane Museum of Art, and Microsoft Corporation.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our first one-person exhibition by Washington artist David Hytone. In work that is constructed by many individual pieces of hand-painted paper, the artist employs a laborious process of collage and painting, glass-plate dry paint transfer and mono print techniques. The resulting images appear compromised or incomplete, like distant memories. “I have been thinking about the notion of the self as an aggregate of separate identities, cobbled loosely together from the different performances we present as we move from one societal construct to another. What I find equally compelling is how memory informs and is informed by this action. I am also intrigued with the idea of reality as performance. Studies in quantum physics such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle have suggested that light and matter behave differently depending on whether or not they are being observed. A poetic reading of this renders the world around us essentially a facade or something akin to a shifting theater set.” 
–David Hytone Biography David Hytone received his BFA in Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after studying briefly at the Osaka University of Arts in Osaka, Japan. He has exhibited in one-person and group exhibitions in Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Portland, Sun Valley, and Ghent, Belgium. He has work in numerous private and corporate collections including Microsoft, Facebook, Capital One, Swedish Hospital, Hilton Hotel and the permanent collection of King County, WA. He was a finalist for the 2018 Neddy Award in Painting.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our tenth one-person exhibition, titled Warm Fusion, by Seattle artist Jeffrey Simmons. The artist’s current paintings continue to explore symmetrical, patterned abstractions through a variety of techniques. Employing brayers, spackling knives, squeegees, and stencils, Simmons creates compositions from layers of thin, transparent pigment or crudely ground particles of iron oxide suspended in acrylic medium. “I apply elements of decorative patterning—derived from ink blots, textiles, stained glass, mosaic, wrought iron, and turned wood—towards formal and expressive ends. The descriptor "decorative" has historically been a pejorative in art criticism, particularly when applied to "serious" abstraction; yet classical abstract painting always shared meaningful elements with crafts that embrace the term more willingly, these elements being shallow pictorial space, non-hierarchical composition, and a predilection towards repetition, among other things. Various historical subsets of abstraction, including 1970s Pattern and Decoration, explored this overlap. An indirect, and deliberately imprecise, paint application technique allows for accident and variation within the rigid structure of each pattern. Throughout the process of making this exhibition, a guiding principle was "welcome mishap.” Voids, blobs, and misaligned colors all serve to activate and enliven the surface of these works.” –Jeffrey Simmons BIOGRAPHY Jeffrey Simmons received his BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. He has been exhibiting in the Northwest since 1995. Simmons was awarded the Betty Bowen Committee Special Recognition Award by the Seattle Art Museum in 1996. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the University of Washington, the Microsoft Corporation, among others.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our tenth exhibition by Seattle artist, Margie Livingston. The paintings in this exhibition build on the artist’s constantly evolving way of art-making. Since we first began exhibited Livingston in 2004, the artist has created distinct bodies of work questioning “painting.” She has shown stylized oil on canvas paintings of tree branches and light, created sculpture from acrylic paint, combined landscape painting with performance in her “dragged paintings,” and, in her 2022 show, created representational acrylic paintings about self reflection. In Flux, Livingston explores the phenomena of pareidolia, the act of seeing images in random stimuli, such as clouds or shadows. “It’s a new way for me to start a painting. Leonardo da Vinci advised painters to “look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene… because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” I poured out paint and used chance occurrences to create my own personal “indistinct things.” As I’ve worked on these paintings, I reflected on how serendipity, chance, and luck have informed these new works and how it’s hard to know where the images really come from.” –Margie Livingston Biography Margie Livingston received her MFA from the University of Washington. In 2001, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed her to study in Germany. She was the 2006 recipient of the Betty Bowen Memorial Award from the Seattle Art Museum. In 2010, Livingston received both the Neddy Artist Fellowship for Painting and the Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust, Seattle, WA. Her work is in the collections of Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Whatcom Museum, and Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, China. She lives and works in Seattle, WA. This work is supported in part by grants from 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth exhibition of photography by Los Angeles artist, Chris Engman. The artist creates labor-intensive alterations to interior settings by installing photographs to the walls, distorting our perceptions of the space. Recently the artist has introduced his son’s drawing and painting into the image. In some cases his son makes his marks directly onto the installed photographs. In other cases Engman uses the 5-year-old’s drawings as source material, altering and embellishing them as he applies them to his installations. “I study his marks, I study him while he makes them. I watch the way he holds his paintbrush and sometimes, though not always, I hold mine in the same ways. Unlike him I step back to think about what I am doing. I measure and calculate, make landscapes and rooms, compose and prepare. I consider the meanings and metaphors. When I’m ready to make marks I push those considerations to a quieter part of my mind. I try to emulate his weasel-like lack of hesitation, his fanaticism, his joy and oblivion." –Chris Engman Other works are photographs of shelving loaded with art supplies, or a crumpled sheet of photo paper in a frame. They have a trompe l'oeil effect and appear to protrude out from the wall. Biography Chris Engman received his MFA from the University of Southern California and BFA from the University of Washington. His work has been collected by the City of Seattle; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Henry Art Gallery, WA; Microsoft Collection, WA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Orange County Art Museum, CA; and Houston Fine Arts Museum, TX. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

In addition to representing artists through one-person exhibitions, we also have a 40 year history working with collectors consigning for resale unique works and editions by some of the most important contemporary artists working today. This exhibition will feature a selection of more than 25 pieces representing out most recent secondary market activity. Featuring: Guy Anderson Deborah Butterfield Kenneth Callahan Michael Dailey Sonia Delauney Jim Dine James Fitzgerald Helen Frankenthaler Richard Gilkey Joseph Goldberg Paul Horiuchi William Ivey Robert Jones Jacob Lawrence Margie Livingston Norman Lundin Sylvia Mangold Alden Mason Peter Millett Robert Motherwell Frank Okada Susan Rothenberg Roger Shimomura Kiki Smith Darren Waterston Anthony White Robert Yoder

We are pleased to announce our third one-person exhibition by Washington artist, Drie Chapek. In Inside The Outside the artist continues her deeply personal approach to oil painting. Incorporating images of both abstracted natural phenomena and human-made spaces and objects, she creates visual space to explore her inner world through imagery from the exterior world. In her lusciously painted work, thick impasto brush strokes along with thin washes of color are deployed to explore the universality of Chapek’s own personal experience. In her search for this common thread of humanity, the artist finds that though “our differences are vast, our connections and similarities are as well.”  “In my work, I am creating visual space to explore my inner world through imagery from the exterior world. I construct my painted environments with personal reminders of complexity, pain, pleasure and delight discovered within these worlds. Through the use of breath work and somatic experiencing I am able to hold the variables of life so that I can stay in my body as an active participant of my human experience. Composing collisions of energies gives me a visual field in which to explore and connect my life's joy and grief experiences.” –Drie Chapek Biography Drie Chapek graduated in 2002 with a BA in painting from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, having studied there with Roger Shimomura. The artist lives and works in Edmonds, WA.

Greg Kucera Gallery is very pleased to announce our fourteenth exhibition of work by Roger Shimomura. Titled More Little White Lies, this exhibition is a sequel to his 2021 gallery exhibition 100 Little White Lies. Again presenting a suite of 12 inch square acrylic paintings, these all made in 2022, the paintings juxtapose such disparate images as the artist’s self-portrait, Disney characters, riffs on masterpiece paintings by Lichtenstein and Warhol’s portraits of celebrities, and scenes from Camp Minidoka, where the artist and his family were imprisoned during World War II. The paintings are at times poignant, satirical, playful and full of outrage. Images of the past intermingle with the immediate present as contemporary artworks hang on the walls of internment barracks, Marilyn Monroe dons the face coverings of a pandemic response, or the silhouette of the artist as a boy renders Camp Minidoka to a canvas. BIOGRAPHY Shimomura received a B.A. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 150 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of more than 30 grants, including 4 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. Shimomura is in the permanent collections of over 100 museums nation wide including the Smithsonian Institute, DC, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. His personal papers and letters are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

Gregory Blackstock began drawing regularly in his mid-40s, cataloguing the world around him just as a botanist might classify plants in terms of families, species and genus, or an entomologist might arrange the various types of insects within his collection. The artist, who was autistic, had a prodigious memory for visual objects, musical tone and compositions, and foreign languages. As a “prodigious savant,” his need to make sense of and define an unpredictable world was given the most deeply satisfying outlet in his art. For Blackstock, the world was made up of countless things which needed to be identified, ordered, and arranged. One thing or another was seemingly of no greater weight but, once he decided to draw the chosen subject, he sought to record all of the specific variations within that group. This exhibition features a selection of drawings and prints reflecting the range of the artist’s oeuvre. Images taken from his taxonomies of the natural world (birds, animals, insects, plants, “weathers”) are seen in context with his encyclopedic view of the manmade world (clothing, cars, buildings, tools) to create the macrocosm which is Blackstock’s world. Biography Blackstock was born in Seattle in 1946. His first solo exhibition in Seattle was at Garde Rail Gallery in 2004. In 2011, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland curated a solo exhibition of Blackstock’s work and holds 15 of his works in its permanent collection. Drawings by Blackstock have been shown or are included in the collections of the several art museums around the USA, including Seattle Art Museum and Blanton Museum at University of Texas, Austin. He has been featured at several art fairs, including the Outsider Fair, New York and Paris. Blackstock was awarded 2017 Wynn Newhouse Foundation award. The Wynn Foundation grants annual awards to an artist of exceptional merit with a disability. The artist died in 2023.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our first one-person exhibition by Portland, OR artist, Elizabeth Malaska. Licking Honey Among Thorns is exhibited in conjunction with the artist’s solo museum exhibition, All Be Your Mirror, at Seattle Art Museum through June 16, 2024. Malaska creates vignettes which respond to Western painting’s and art history’s use of the feminine form. In these works on paper, the artist presents her Feminist perspective in confrontational and theatrical tableaux. A model poses for an artist while an Afghan Hound stares out at the viewer. A horse trots through the square in Tintoretto’s DISCOVERY OF THE BODY OF SAINT MARK. In KNEELING GODDESS, a contorted female figure appears confined by the edges of the picture plane. “Painting’s histories overwhelmingly include the figure, most often the female figure as Object-to-Be-Visually-Consumed. In addition to being a way to process sensations and personal/collective experiences, I see my work with the figure as a profound opportunity to acknowledge and engage painting’s pasts while also imagining and postulating more just, complex, and dynamic futures. I center femme and female figures in my paintings, actively working to foreground and disrupt histories of objectification, making space for a more whole and liberated subject. “ –Elizabeth Malaska Biography Elizabeth Malaska earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Hallie Ford Fellowship from The Ford Family Foundation. Malaska’s work is in the permanent collection at Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, and Hallie Ford Museum. She is the 2022 recipient of The Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum, and her solo exhibition, All Be Your Mirror, is on view at SAM through June 16, 2024. She is represented by Wilding Cran (Los Angeles, CA) and Russo Lee (Portland, OR). She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth solo exhibition by New York artist, Tim Roda. The show’s title, Vantage Points, makes reference to both the angle or view from which a photograph is taken and a the perspective from which one can view their family. “My Italian American childhood had a profound influence on my decision to become an artist. I was not raised in a typical middle-class family. My grandparents and parents had their own ideas about life: eccentricities that leave me, as an adult, often confused and searching for answers. Much of my work stems from memories, both real and borrowed, that I have fused with present day social commentaries. I translate memories and current observations to create a celebration of life in Italy and the U.S.; at times being satirical about the family spectacle. My artwork draws contrasts between sheer raw experiences and manipulated tension.“ –Tim Roda Roda stages elaborate tableaux from an idiosyncratic collection of props built from wood, clay, paper and everyday items. Inserting himself, his wife, and his sons into these scenes, the resulting images are diaristic, filled with reverberations of his childhood memories and family traditions. Incorporating elements of installation and performance, Roda’s complex compositions of light and shadow, religious symbols and strange costumes convey stories that are ambiguous yet somehow familiar. The resulting photographs conflate the past and the present, suggesting the unreliability and eccentricities of memory, photography and theatricality. Biography Tim Roda has a BFA from Pennsylvania State University (2002) and an MFA from the University of Washington (2004), both in ceramics. His work is in the collections of Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Gaia Collection, Turin, Italy; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL. His work is also part of numerous private collections. Roda lives and works in New York.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of work by Seattle artist Cris Bruch. In Garden Variety, the artist explores the diverse forms he finds in the gardens of his Vashon Island home. Pooled water, crossed tree branches, and clumps of grass reveal nature’s ability to create an endless array of patterns. “Garden variety means common, unexceptional, ordinary. Yet I have been continually surprised by the variousness of forms and habits and ways of growth in our gardens. Plants make extraordinary changes as they develop from seeds through maturity to making seeds to dying. The phases of growth seem like a display of unlimited formal invention. The range and combinations of colors are often beyond adequate description. The vigor and mystery are amazing. Astonishingly, it is all seemingly effortless, dependent only on sun and water and soil. Variety in the garden is infinite and a source of wonder.” –Cris Bruch Biography Cris Bruch earned a BFA in ceramics/sculpture at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Following completion of an MFA and MA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Bruch moved to Seattle in 1986. In 1989, he received the Northwest Major Works Award from the Seattle Arts Commission. In 1990, Bruch received the Betty Bowen Memorial Award, created a permanent entry sculpture for the Port Angeles Fine Art Center and was selected for residencies at the Ateliers Hoherweg, Dusseldorf, Germany; Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, CA; and Centrum Foundation, Port Townsend, WA. In 2001, he received a Neddy Fellowship from the Behnke Foundation in Seattle. A comprehensive survey of his work was presented by the Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT in 2003, portions of which then traveled to the Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID in 2004. Bruch’s career has included several public commissions. He has created iconic large-scale sculptures for the University of Washington, Seattle; the Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, OR; 5th Avenue Transit Corridor, Portland, OR; and Brightwater Environmental Education and Community Center, Woodenville, WA, among others. Bruch has received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Artist Fellowship (2006), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award (2007), an Artist Trust GAP grant (2006 and 2012), 4Culture Individual Artist Project Grant (2011) and a Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs CityArtist Project Grant (2012). In 2016, Bruch had a solo exhibition, Others Who Were Here, at Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. The artist lives and works on Vashon Island.

WITH WORK BY: Humaira Abid, Juventino Aranda, Ross Palmer Beecher, Loretta Pettway Bennett, Gregory Blackstock, Cris Bruch, John Buck, Deborah Butterfield, Mark Calderon, Drie Chapek, Michael Dailey, Jack Daws, Chris Engman, Claudia Fitch, Jane Hammond, Michael Knuteson, Margie Livingston, Norman Lundin,Sherry Markovitz, Peter Millett, Mark Newport, Tim Roda, Roger Shimomura, Jeffrey Simmons, Susan Skilling, SuttonBeresCuller, Whiting Tennis, Lynne Woods Turner, Joey Veltkamp, Darren Waterston, Dan Webb, Alice Wheeler, Anthony White, Ed Wicklander, Claude Zervas After 40 thrilling years of doing business in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, we at the Greg Kucera Gallery are celebrating by staying in business. We are not closing. Or even slowing down. We are not transitioning to an online only or social media gallery. We are not becoming private dealers. We are not becoming an “art fair only” gallery.  Instead, we are embracing our past, our present, and our future by continuing to represent and exhibit some of the finest of contemporary artists. The pleasure found in our business is in encouraging the passionate obsessions of our collectors in response to the intelligence and creativity of our artists. We are staying the course of our original mission. For this exhibition, we have invited our represented artists to exhibit pairs of works; one early, and one recent. These curated juxtapositions will reveal aspects of their creative histories — showing where they have been in contrast to where they are now — both within their career and through their partnership with the gallery.  “Looking back into my 40 year history with these artists, I'm sentimental about the many friendships that have developed. In touching ways, I feel like I've grown up with many of my artists. It's incredible to think I've had relationships of nearly 40 years with artists such as Mark Calderon, Ross Palmer Beecher, and Roger Shimomura. I started the gallery when I was a confident, (but naive) 27 year old. My timing was lucky though, and we have all benefited from that good fortune.  “Now, I'm 67 and I'm slowly retiring in France. I still work for the gallery every day. While Seattle sleeps, I'm answering emails from time zones elsewhere. When the gallery is open, I'm often working with Jim and Carol from afar, writing texts, answering emails, and making phone calls. I am simply not at my desk in Seattle every day as I had been for so long. “I feel that I do this business now as easily as I breathe so working remotely, and intermittently, throughout the day gives me great satisfaction. “These decades have flown by and the contemporary art world has reflected the changes in various arenas of politics, economics, social justice, and the environment. Our artists, and the gallery itself, will continue to reflect these same things as we all continue to change. Let us embrace the future with strong hopes and good intentions.”  —Greg Kucera "Contemporary art is meant to represent art of today. But it necessitates building on a foundation reinforced by the art that came before it. Carol and I have a similar task. Taking the legacy that is Greg Kucera Gallery, with all of its history, and using it to create something that reflects the art of our moment. We've enjoyed the gallery’s presence in Seattle and in the larger art world. We look forward to taking it into its next stages. “The world keeps changing and so will we." — Jim Wilcox

Among the 20th century’s most important artists, Jacob Lawrence documented the African-American experience and the life of the working man. The drawing and many of the prints in this exhibition are from the artist’s Builders series, depicting daily life of blue-collar workers. In some works, like BUILDERS NO. 14, the workers gather around a workbench fitting together wood joints and handing each other the necessary tools. The print CARPENTERS shows men spread throughout a room, drilling holes and sawing planks of wood. Other works include FOREST CREATURES, an etching and drypoint print depicting Harriet Tubman leading fugitive slaves to safety using celestial navigation and the position of the North Star. Tubman was born a slave in Maryland, and escaped to freedom in 1849. For the next 10 years, she returned to the South nineteen times, guiding slaves to freedom in the North through the Underground Railroad. The exhibition also has prints from Lawrence’s suite “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” depicting scenes from the life of the 18th century Haitian general. Born a slave, Toussaint L’Ouverture rose to lead a slave rebellion and revolution. He coordinated the effort to draw up the first democratic constitution of Haiti. In 1802, before the Haitian Republic was firmly established, he was arrested by Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops, sent to Paris, and imprisoned. He died one year later. One year after his death, Haiti became the first Black Western republic. BIOGRAPHY Born in 1917, Jacob Lawrence gained national recognition at the age of 23 for his MIGRATION SERIES, a 60 panel series of paintings depicting the Great Migration of African-Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban North between 1916 and 1970. He has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY, and many other international institutions. The Seattle Art Museum has hosted important exhibitions of his work, as has the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. His work has been collected by museums around the world.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce its 14th exhibition of new sculpture by Deborah Butterfield. This is a diverse collection of new bronze work. Small sculptures have delicate lines created by branch, twig and leaf shapes. Larger pieces incorporate thick sticks and muscular looking chunks of wood, all cast in bronze. Since 1980, Butterfield has been constructing sculptures of horses from found sticks and plant material from which she creates a casting in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington State. Butterfield sculpts the original work by fastening logs, branches, and sticks onto an armature that gives the basic posture of the particular horse. First, molds are made for each branch of wood material piece by piece. The burnable wood elements are covered with heat resistant plaster and baked in a furnace until they completely burn away. Next, molten bronze is poured into the recesses left in the plaster molds. When the molds are removed, each piece has been refashioned exactly in bronze—right down to the grain of the wood. The work is reassembled, and the bronze parts welded together. Finally, Butterfield works with the foundry to apply a range of patinas to the bronze to suggest the original wood used in making the sculpture. Deborah Butterfield was born in San Diego, California in 1949. She received her BA and MFA from UC Davis. Butterfield's work has been featured in over 50 museum exhibitions. She has had one-person exhibitions at: Bellevue Arts Museum; Bellevue, WA, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; Denver Botanic Gardens; Tucson Museum of Art; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, FL; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV and Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; San Diego Museum of Art; Tucson Museum of Art; University Art Museum, University of Louisiana, Lafayette. The artist will have a one-person exhibition, P.S. These Are Not Horses, at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at University of California, Davis, October 1, 2023–June 24, 2024. Butterfield’s work is included in the permanent collections of many major museums, including: The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; Dallas Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Palm Springs Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The artist was a recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center.

In Timea Tihanyi’s ceramic sculptures heavily textured undulating surfaces billow, gather, and fold like linen. Her medium, porcelain, resembles starched fabrics of a long-gone past, stubbornly holding their shape, while beginning to succumb to unseen forces. For Tihanyi, the craft heritage of handmaking is as important as the digital technology she builds her sculptures with. An early innovator with ceramic 3D printing, the artist carefully examines the binary world of technology and puts the digital in dialogue with the clay material. She references domestic textiles from Hungary: puffy down beddings (“dunyha”) and wedding dowries of crisp linens (“kelengye”) decorated with traditional cross-stitch embroidery patterns from Central and Eastern Europe. Tihanyi’s explores personal and community histories, economic and political contexts, and the natural language of materials she uses and references. Her research combines basic geometric motifs from Hungarian embroidery. Building the work meticulously and patiently, she layers original design elements digitally in a CAD program until a more complex and entirely novel image emerges. The stitches in the cloth are translated as textures—made up by small bumps and loops in porcelain—extruded by the 3D printer. Tihanyi’s work references the pottery tradition of the vessel. Embracing a hollow volume, its walls are being shaped by forces both from the inside and the outside. Similarly, Tihanyi’s sculptures are reshaped after the printing with gentle pressure, weight, and gravity in repeated firings. The resulting forms are always a surprise. The precision of the digital code meets accidental slippages of clay, balancing intention with serendipity, precariousness with strength, and mathematical logic with beauty. BIOGRAPHY Tihanyi holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary, a BFA in Ceramics from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited in museums nationally and internationally. She has received received the Neddy Award in Open Media in 2018, a 2018-19 Bergstrom Award, and a New Foundation travel grant. In Seattle, her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions at Gallery 4Culture, CoCA, Consolidated works, Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Gallery, Linda Hodges Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, and SOIL Gallery. Tihanyi is a Teaching Professor in the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts program at the University of Washington. She is the founder and director of Slip Rabbit, a unique mentoring space for experimentation and learning at the intersections of art, design, architecture, science, and engineering. Slip Rabbit is the first technoceramics studio in the Pacific Northwest. She lives and works in Seattle, WA. Supported by 2022 CityArtist Grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of new works by Northwest artist, Joey Veltkamp. The show’s title, “Tell Your Cat I Said PsPsPs,” is a popular meme about getting the attention of a disinterested cat. During the pandemic, the artist and Ben, his husband, discovered they had no problem attracting felines to their Bremerton home, having no cats at the start and letting five cats into their household in just 6-months. Before the arrival of felines, Veltkamp’s house was usually full of fresh-cut garden flowers which they had spent the past few years planting. Unfortunately, many of their favorites (lilies, tulips, peonies) are toxic to cats. Now their home is mostly devoid of indoor flowers. As a result, the artist began making floral arrangements out of fabric. The quilts, or “soft paintings,” in this exhibition are filtered through the lens of the artist’s daily life. The subjects mostly being traditional paired-down still-lifes of flower arrangements and images of cats, allowing the beauty of the flowers to remain while documenting the joy that this abundance of cats have brought to their household. Joey Veltkamp has shown work in exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and the Frye art Museum. The artist had his first one-person museum exhibition, SPIRIT!, at Bellevue Arts Museum in 2022-23. His work is in the collections of Seattle Art Museum and King County Public Art Collection. He currently lives and works in Bremerton, WA.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our first exhibition, Supreme Fresh, by Long Beach, CA based, Oaxacan artist, Narsiso Martinez. Drawn from his own experiences as a farmworker, Martinez creates drawings, prints and mixed media installations that pay homage to the people behind the scenes in the agricultural economy who toil in the fields picking the produce we consume. His subjects are depicted in the gear they wear to perform this necessary, but dangerous, job. Hats and goggles are worn to shield them from the sun. Masks and bandanas cover their mouths and noses to protect them from pesticides. Martinez creates his images in ink, gouache, and charcoal, directly on discarded produce boxes. Integrating the boxes’ graphics into the composition, the artist gives context to the portraits, contrasting the disparities of socioeconomic lifestyles between that of the farmworkers and agribusiness owners. Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in 2009 from Los Angeles City College, his Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach in 2012, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach in 2018. His work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.

The exhibition, titled The Space Between Things, is the artist's continued exploration of visual detail through imagined still-lifes, studio views, and landscape vistas. Working primarily from memory rather than direct observation, Lundin's paintings incorporate everyday objects and settings to create seemingly casual, but in actuality quite formal, compositions.

Wicklander is a craftsman of diverse talents. His work involves many different techniques including wood carving, blown and cast glass, metal-smithing and welding, bronze casting, and an intriguing combination of materials. Wicklander sees his forte as his "ability to use very different materials to their greatest advantage."

The title, Extended Warranty, is a sarcastic jab by the artist at a world he continues to explore, celebrate, and criticize. An extended warranty is often sold as a purported necessary protection against disaster. But in reality only certain things, things that will never need repair or replacement, are covered. It is something we will pay for that we will likely never use. If we do end up using it, it is never as good as we hoped.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our fifteenth one-person exhibition of work by New York artist Darren Waterston since 1993. This exhibition, titled Last Time I Saw You, is the artist’s personal and intimate reflection on loss, dream states, and the desire to articulate the unknowable or unseeable. The otherworldly and atmospheric compositions of Waterston’s paintings have references to celestial bodies, spectral apparitions, water and air, light and shadow, and the act of flight. “More personal in nature, these paintings record my own navigation through the loss of a friend and the poetic pathos and even joy, that can come out of contemplations of impermanence.” – Darren Waterston Biography Darren Waterston (born 1965, Fresno, CA) graduated with a BFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1988, after studying at the Akademie der Künste and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of the British Library, London, England; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; The Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA; UCLA Hammer Museum, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Boise Art Museum, ID; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Stanford University Library, Stanford, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; New York Public Library, New York City, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University, WA; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; and Seattle Art Museum, WA. He lives and works in Hudson, NY.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our eleventh one-person exhibition of work by Seattle artist Ross Palmer Beecher. While not a Folk artist, Beecher is endlessly fascinated by the many forms it can take, the contexts surrounding its production, and the complete devotion to a given craft that Folk and self-taught artists bring to their work. Using a variety of primarily recycled materials the artist f i l ter s these t radi t ions in making her contemporary objects. She embraces her New England roots while her observations of the world we live in today are revealed through a wide variety of political and personal themes executed in her own particular brand of Yankee ingenuity. The artist’s quilts and sculptures are made of tin cans, uniforms, aluminum pop cans, assorted metal containers, and musical instruments. Using well-known American designs for quilting, Beecher uses the printed information on metal in the same way that traditional quilters use patterned fabrics. The pieces are cut out with tin snips, stitched together with wire and hand cut staples, and combined with other found objects. “Drawing, painting, and block printing have always been part of my tool box but it is my metal quilts that push me beyond my edge to a place of new possibilities and the hope of innovation. My bridge moment into making metal quilts happened when I moved to the west coast. I saw a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe framed in metal AA battery casings. Connecting readily available free recycled material and the environmental benefit of reusing it in my art, made my heart pound.” – Ross Palmer Beecher

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our third one-person exhibition of work by Northwest artist Juventino Aranda. The multimedia artist explores issues of identity, social justice and the marginalization of cultures in today’s United States. Aranda’s search for self-identity informs his process as it relates to Pre-Columbian Mexico and the social, political, and economic struggles of this late capitalistic American society. Using a variety of materials and techniques the artist makes work that appropriates images and phrases from his childhood and family history. Paintings, several on Pendleton blankets, comment on the artist and his cultural identity. “I am Mexican and second generation “American”. My work demarcates the intersection of my Mexican and American identities. I am not Hispanic, Latino, and definitely not Spanish —even though I live everyday with the consequences of their conquest. My art struggles with feeling foreign in my native land. Not unlike my personal experiences of never fully ascribing to one cultural category, my artwork also blends and manipulates the categories of painting and sculpture, craft and high art, manufacturing and handmade work to develop a new visual lexicon that reflects the contemporary conditions of my experiences. My processes and material choices are embedded in the experiences of marginalized communities.” – Juventino Aranda “By using textiles as the canvas and embroidery as the paint, I am mirroring my attempt to uncover and celebrate those cultures and communities who are the foundation of a society but are often covered up or whitewashed by mainstream narratives. My wall-works are simultaneously paintings and sculptures. They include and combine paint, urethane resin, oil sticks, bronze, mirror, birch panel and corrugated cardboard. This media mixing is both high and low, native and foreign, other and accepted.” – Juventino Aranda

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our fourth exhibition by Seattle artist, Dan Webb. The exhibition, Burn, explores the destructive yet cleansing quality of fire. In Webb’s sculptures, nature and humankind are scorched by flame yet manage to survive, even thrive, in the charred remains. “When I say the word Burn out loud, my mind skitters over environmental disasters, endless forest fires, climate change, and the precarious state of the planet. But it only starts there. I also hear myself extending the word into a simple phrase — burn it down — which starts up yet another cascade of associations relating to governments, hierarchies, and cultural institution resistant to change. The idea that creative destruction is not only a physical force, deeply embedded in nature, but a cultural force, deeply embedded in the human psyche, is an interesting one. Nature has evolution, and we have revolution. Nature reinvents itself endlessly. We war with each other, and then drift back towards an oligarchic version of patriarchy. But maybe there is a new way of burning it down. A human hand, with its opposable thumb, has long been an avatar for humanity in much of my work, while the flower has long operated as a stand-in for nature. By making the leaves of the flowers start to reference human hands, the two began to overlap. The things that they do, either separately or together, seem logical enough, but the relationship is unclear, and the power dynamic undecided.” – Dan Webb

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh exhibition by Seattle artist Whiting Tennis. The title, Provincetown Drawings, refers to a September 2021 artist residency at Provincetown Tennis Club, home of the DNA Residency Studios, in Provincetown, MA.

The artist draws from a long-standing personal tradition of making and sending cards, from birthday and holiday cards to invitations and thank-yous. Livingston realized these bits of personal correspondence– sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate– has always been a place where she could experiment with new images and media.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our seventh exhibition by Portland artist Lynne Woods Turner. While the exhibition is evenly distributed between pencil on paper and oil painting, the show primarily focuses on drawing. Whether it be a painted line, a graphite line, a scratched line etched into oil paint, or simply an emphasized edge, drawing is the foundation of the work.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our third one-person exhibition of work by Las Vegas painter, Tim Bavington. In tribute to Bavington’s late friend and mentor, Dave Hickey, the exhibition’s title, The End Has No End (for Dave Hickey), comes from a song of the same name by New York rock band, The Strokes. The artist associates the title with one of Hickey’s favorite koans: “The branch from which the blossom hangs is neither long nor short.”

After our premier exhibition of David Byrd's work in 2013, much has progressed for his enduring legacy. Though he died a month after our show closed, we partnered with his estate to introduce his work in New York City at the 2014 ADAA art fair. His friend, Jody Isaacson, has expanded his career from there.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh solo exhibition of work by artist Jody Isaacson. In 1984 the Seattle native showed traditional wood block prints with Northwest imagery. Then, as now, her hand chiseled wood blocks– the matrix for her prints– are treated as art pieces. Her 1989 show featured an installation including two 14 x 20 foot wood block prints focusing on patterns drawn from cedar forests and wood grain patterns.

The editions in this exhibition were created utilizing a variety of printing techniques lithography, intaglio, relief, woodcut, screen and pigment print. Materials as diverse as cardboard, mylar, plastic, metallic foil and tape are deployed in delicate and deeply emotional compositions.

A “second-generation” member of the Northwest School, Richard Gilkey was known for his rugged, straightforward approach to painting the lush landscape of the Skagit Valley. Skunk cabbage, marshes, snaking rivers and night skies were depicted with muscular strokes of paint applied with pallet knives as well as brushes.

BLUE PEARL, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over wood panel 48 x 33.75 inches

FOUR CROSSED INVERTING FIELDS #2, 2019 Watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works on paper by Jacob Lawrence. Among the 20th century’s most important artists, Lawrence documented the African-American experience and the life of the working man. We will feature many prints from two major suites and also several individual well-known prints for sale.
 Also included will be several drawings and paintings from Lawrence’s career. One painting depicts the “Celebration of Heritage” of the Native American communities. Another illustrates a family wondering over its newest addition, a small baby. We will have several drawings from the Vesalius Series, illustrating the musculature of the human body in motion. A watercolor shows a track meet while a colored pencil drawing and an ink drawing shows carpenters in motion, both from the “Builders Series.” “The Legend of John Brown” details the life of the American abolitionist who organized a movement to arm slaves and overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. “The Life of Toussaint l’Ouverture” tells the story of the Haitian general and charismatic leader of the Haitian Revolution, an insurrection by self-liberated slaves in the French colony or Saint-Domingue. Both suites depict the buildup and aftermath of battles waged to end slavery.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of prints by New York artist Anders Bergstrom. With this exhibition, Bergstrom continues his exploration of the common brown paper bag. Each jagged edge, creased fold, and greasy stain is an homage to this everyday object that we usually take for granted. But there is now a more playful, less reality-based result, allowing the final work to be more colorful, painterly, and thought-provoking.