Val Britton: Ghost Coast
Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
May 1 – June 19, 2025
Berggruen Gallery presents Ghost Coast, an exhibition of new two-dimensional mixed media works by Portland-based artist VAL BRITTON. Combining painting, collage, ink, watercolor, drawing, and cut paper, Britton’s works of abstraction form invented psycho-geographic terrains that explore themes of memory, care, and transformation. This show marks Britton's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Britton’s compositions mimic and evoke the intertwining of spatial networks–cosmological, symbolic, emotional, topographic–that we inhabit at each given moment. Playing with various aerial and terrestrial perspectives, Britton’s kinetic collages of cut, stained, and painted paper evoke the formal language of map-making. Yet, her shapes and forms coalesce to create imaginary dreamscapes. Britton’s interest in maps began when she was a young artist as a way to process the loss of her father, a long-haul truck driver and mechanic, who passed away when Britton was young. When she road-tripped across the country to begin graduate school at California College of the Arts, Val Britton used an atlas to piece together old itineraries and retrace his cross-country routes. This was a profound experience for Britton, as it allowed her to excavate memories and relocate forgotten histories. While the literal map has receded from Britton’s compositions, she remains interested in mapping as a conceptual process–how notions of vastness, distance, and time affect us deeply. Perhaps more portal than landscape, Britton’s works offer terrains of observation, as Jens Hoffman wrote, “to view Britton’s work is to remain open to the places your own associations and affinities might take you.”
Equally as important as Britton's theoretical interest in the delineation of space and time is an ethos of caretaking which approaches materials as an opportunity for mending. Val Britton asks how art might re-embody that which has been rejected, overlooked, or forgotten. Britton’s materials often come from repurposed objects, such as found paper, and discarded ink cartridges. As a resident of Portland's Glean (2022) and San Francisco’s Recology Artist-in-Residency Program (2010), Britton confronted the grief of collective waste and further explored an art practice rooted in regenerative action and conservation. During her time at the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine (2024), she began using salt water in all of her paintings. The minerals build up on the surface of her compositions, adding further to the tactile nature of each painting, as well as prioritizing the usage of non-toxic materials.
Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in printmaking, Britton’s paintings and large-scale installations approach paper as a medium with vast sculptural potential. Deviating from the strict-editioning of her rigorous printmaking training, Britton looks for the surprise and slippage in each image–preferring hand cutting over laser in order to allow each work to unfurl intuitively. This embrace of unpredictability also draws her to water-based media, where the uncontrollable nature of water and pigment becomes an essential part of her process. As it flows, soaks, and marbles across the compositions, pools of pigment spread across the paintings like bodies of water from above–a method imbued with a “mixture of chance, surprise, and surrender.” Often working in series, Val Britton embraces a call-and-response approach akin to improvisational jazz—a mode of spontaneity, emotion, and interplay. She develops multiple compositions at once, allowing them to engage in an evolving dialogue. The title Ghost Coast hints at various interpretations–the map, the print, the planet, the personal. The disappearing of coastlines, the history of filling in the San Francisco Bay, the usage of ghost prints in the monoprint process, the embodied histories of reclaimed materials, and the returning to paths and memories of those who have passed.
VAL BRITTON received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design before completing her MFA from California College of the Arts. An award-winning public artist with permanent commissions at San Francisco International Airport among others, Britton’s work is part of numerous collections, including the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, Facebook Headquarters, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor San Francisco, Library of Congress, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library Print Collection, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Britton's work has been shown in over 65 solo and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, art fairs, universities, and non-profit institutions nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of many grants, fellowships, and residencies including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship. Born in Livingston, New Jersey, Val Britton spent 14 years in San Francisco before relocating to the Pacific Northwest, where she now lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
BERGGRUEN GALLERY
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105
