Lucy Williams: Radiant City Exhibition @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco + Book

Lucy Williams

Radiant City

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

November 6, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Radiant City, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist LUCY WILLIAMS. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s third solo presentation with the artist

Williams’s works are fastidiously engineered to produce uncanny miniature worlds suspended between the second and third dimensions—facades that are simultaneously industrial and tactile. Drawing on modernist buildings and interiors, Lucy Williams redefines collage through intricately crafted mixed-media bas-reliefs. Her sleek, serene scenes of period architecture ripple with texture and aqueous reflections. She simulates the tiled surfaces of swimming pools, the austere facades of Brutalist buildings, and the regimented rows of libraries and bookcases. Painstakingly hand-crafted, Lucy Williams constructs her works in ascending layers of varying materials such as paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread.

Beginning with a full-scale pencil drawing, Lucy Williams creates a digital copy from which she laser cuts the structural base and hand-cuts colored paper to form curtains, blinds, books, vases, pots, and lampshades. Each piece is laid on top of the drawing until she is ready to collage within a shallow space, adding paper home furnishings as she builds the work. Panels are over-stitched with thread, and a Perspex layer is used to replicate the windows, all of which have been etched and hand-painted to add further detail. Of her process, she says: “You have to give it as much time as possible, it’s really important, because in time is the transformation.”

Through embroidery and a warm tonal palette, Williams’s work exploits the tension between the humane, intimate spaces she produces and the hard-edge geometric buildings she references. The perceived depth and inherent flatness of the work occupy the liminal space between painting and sculpture. “Her work resonates with the textures and geometries of Anni Albers and Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa—not just in their forms, but in the energy, dedication, and intentionality they brought to their work,” said Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition title Radiant City comes from Le Corbusier's unrealized architectural proposal for a utopian megalopolis that would seamlessly integrate humankind with nature and the technological innovations of the twentieth century. The concrete apartments—composed of modular units, imposing towers, and symmetry—were conceived to address urgent housing needs and to use modern architecture as a tool for societal reform. While Radiant City itself was never realized, its principles came to life in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The patchwork play of color and light across the façade of what might otherwise have been a monotonous expanse resulted in one of modern architecture's most iconic designs. In Radiant City, Lucy Williams captures the delicate balance of materiality, shape, and color that made Unité d’Habitation so visually resonant. She does this through multiple iterations, probing the tension between social egalitarianism and a dehumanizing uniformity.

Radiant City features both representational and abstract works by Lucy Williams. During the pandemic, she began experimenting with non-representational compositions to explore the rhythmic, repetitive visual qualities of form. This experimentation allowed her to develop new threading techniques, which she then brought into her representational works, along with miniature versions of the abstractions themselves. “Slate, aubergine and rose triangles float over vertical threads of different colours and thicknesses, adding a lyrical stringed element to the already dynamic forms. In these, Lucy Williams controls space like the modernists Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth before her,” said art critic Charlotte Mullins. Though the figure never appears in her work, one need only view it in person to experience the narrative power of her spaces—how they draw the viewer in, both baffled by their fabrication and longing to occupy their meditative worlds.

Lucy Williams was born in Oxford, England, in 1972. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 1996 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2003. The artist has since exhibited her work internationally, with solo shows including Pavilion at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2012), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014) and Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Lucy Williams’s work has also been represented in major group exhibitions, such as Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019). Lucy Williams currently lives and works in London.

Lucy Williams – Radiant City

By Lucy Williams

Contributions by Ben Street, Salena Barry, Kathryn Lloyd 

and Charlotte Mullins / Edited by Matt Price / 

Foreword by Joseph Becker

Published by Hurtwood Press Ltd 

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

Book Cover courtesy of  Simon & Schuster

264 pages featuring 160 illustrations (colour and black & white)

Hardback, 290 x 245 mm portrait

Available at Berggruen Gallery or on its Website

The exhibition coincides with Lucy Williams’s new publication, Radiant City. The gallery will host an artist discussion, moderated by Joseph Becker, Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, and a book release event at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6, 2025, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. 

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Jane Hammond @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - 'Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls' Exhibition

Jane Hammond

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

October 23, 2025 – January 8, 2026

Berggruen Gallery presents Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist JANE HAMMOND. This exhibition marks the gallery's third solo exhibition with the artist.

Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls features mixed-media botanical assemblages composed of images acquired through a rigorous process of research and collection, yet arranged improvisationally. Hammond's hyper-detailed compositions probe the relationships between ecology, observation, and knowledge. Through a system of images shaped by the poetics of language, Jane Hammond produces lavish arrangements of vivid and fantastical forms drawn from the natural world. Using several printmaking techniques such as relief printing and linocut, as well as combining painting and drawing, Hammond’s compositions employ myriad methodologies. Jane Hammond often prints from hand-made plates on painted and collaged grounds.

Jane Hammond’s works draw on both found and personal photographs she has collected over many years. She recontextualizes these images, often dramatically altering color, scale, and resolution, and builds her arrangements based on symbolic and physical associations. Her botanical arrangements brim with flora and fauna from disparate species across continents and temporalities, resulting in bouquets that exist outside the realm of possibility. While beautiful and meticulously arranged, these are not traditional botanicals. Hammond’s works—made up of both living and extinct flora and fauna—present a plentitude both ravishing and increasingly threatened by ecological destruction.

Shaped by the aesthetics of post-minimalism in 1970s New York, Jane Hammond avoided botanical subjects for decades, though an interest in the natural world was a throughline in her childhood, education, and later life. Of the work in Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, Jane Hammond has said: “It’s a different enterprise to make these botanicals now than it would have been 30 years ago because the environment from which all this plentitude emanates is now intensely jeopardized."

Jane Hammond also has a keen interest in the history of material culture. She mines the traditions of ceramics, glass, and metalwork across the globe for her containers, as well as the world of artisanal papermaking for the handmade grounds she crafts for each piece. These unique compositions are made of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, yet ultimately resolve harmoniously. Hammond's rigorous compositional process involves constant readjustments of placement, scale, and color until she achieves a desired “harmony built from tension and difference.” These tensions impart power and vitality to their final resolution. Hammond's works play with language, allegory, and games to invite the viewer into a mythical world blooming with an encyclopedic collection of images, where edification comes from searching and surprise.

Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Bridgeport, CT. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972, an MFA from Arizona State University in 1974, and a second MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of over eighty museums, including the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, and more. Jane Hammond currently lives and works in New York City.

Jane Hammond’s forthcoming publication, Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, will be released in spring 2026.

*   *   *   *   *

Berggruen Gallery also presents Interiors, a group exhibition of paintings and works on paper depicting interior spaces. The exhibition is on view through January 8, 2026.

The works in Interiors reveal a range of artistic engagement with physical and psychological space. Drawing from distinct painterly vocabularies—realism, abstraction, and Bay Area Figuration—Interiors brings together diverse contemplations of space, light, and memory. Whether probing the spatial drama of the domestic—a place of routine, leisure, and introspection—or conveying architectural tropes such as windows, doorways, and hallways, Interiors offers various contemporary reflections on the inhabited worlds around us, both real and imagined. 

Exhibiting Artists: David Bates | Helen Berggruen | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Nicasio Fernandez | Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen | Raffi Kalenderian | JJ Manford | Rachel Simon Marino | Tom McKinley | Linda Pouliot | Jillian Shea | Gail Spaien | Seesha Takagishi | Anna Valdez | Lucy Williams | Paul Wonner

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Nicasio Fernandez @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Light Whispers" Exhibition

Nicasio Fernandez: Light Whispers

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Light Whispers, an exhibition of new work by New York artist NICASIO FERNANDEZ. This marks the gallery’s first solo presentation with Nicasio Fernandez. 

In Light Whispers, Nicasio Fernandez’s paintings convey a quiet intensity within moody, introspective settings, where his figures are steeped in a spectrum of emotions ranging from uncertainty and tension to concern and doubt. Drawing on film noir motifs—low-key light, deep shadows, and psychological intensity—Nicasio Fernandez places otherworldly figures in eerie, dramatic atmospheres that leave the viewer both unsettled and curious. Though traces of the domestic linger, the paintings deliberately omit any indicators of place, cultivating an enigmatic sense of space.  

Rather than referencing specific film stills, Fernandez’s works are instead constructed around a captivating moment, lingering feeling, or a memory Nicasio Fernandez has held onto and reshaped into his own vision. All but one painting conceal their cinematic references. "Dark Corner", titled after the 1954 film, depicts a forward-leaning figure in motion, the face and long brown overcoat partially backlit by an ambiguous source just outside the frame. The figure moves swiftly through a mysterious nightscape—perhaps in pursuit of something—seems to pause in hesitation, as if aware of a lurking presence.

While Nicasio Fernandez is known for his vibrant chromatic choices, subtle dark humor, and precise handling of materials—demonstrating an ability to be loud and provocative—this body of work marks a decisive shift toward restraint and alteration. His bold palette has been pared down and placed within a uniform tonal temperature. Scratchy brushwork reveals parts of the underpainting, while sharp, crisp edges begin to dissolve. The use of light nods not only to cinema but also to the art historical references such as Rembrandt’s portraiture and the soft glow of Vuillard’s domestic interiors. Fernandez’s purposeful obscuring of elements of the paintings in deeper shadows acts as a framing device to guide the viewer’s eye across the canvas.

Nicasio Fernandez refers to these small paintings as whispers; much like the transfer of sound, these works require close proximity to spark an exchange—inviting the viewer to step into the scene in order to fully dissect and absorb its information. Like considered sequences from cinema, the paintings invite open dialogue and allow space for interpretation. Through this quietness, Fernandez’s paintings offer a light whisper to the viewer, gently luring them into a mysterious, contemplative state.

NICASIO FERNANDEZ (b. 1993, Yonkers, NY) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2015. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Harper’s, Los Angeles, New York, and East Hampton (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2018); Half Gallery, New York (2023, 2022); Alexander Berggruen, New York (2023, 2022); Ross + Kramer, New York and East Hampton (2022, 2021, and 2020); Over the Influence, Hong Kong and Los Angeles (2020, 2019). Fernandez’s work is included in the collections of the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA; and The Bunker, Palm Beach, FL. His work has appeared in Artnet, At Large, and New American Paintings, among other publications. Nicasio Fernandez lives and works in upstate New York.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Matt Kleberg @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Bless Babel" Exhibition

Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Bless Babel, an exhibition of new work by San Antonio-based artist Matt Kleberg. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Matt Kleberg.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg’s paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects. These paintings are not portals, unless you believe they are. They are not windows, unless you believe they are. 

This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Knowing, in which the writer and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as fundamental to the creative act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as necessary modes of engagement between a piece of art and the earlier works of previous makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages offer an example of how different approaches to the same concept are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new paintings embrace the constraints of particular shapes borrowed from Tramp Art frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to explore how different resolutions can come out of multiple iterations of the same motifs.

Matt Kleberg’s paintings contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and bright blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap green. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; interior space collapses into itself as one moves closer. Shimmering like television static or speckled concrete, colors that appear solid break apart upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift in their nature–perhaps waiting to coalesce. Some paintings tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and inviting, formal yet playful. Indebted as much to American folk art traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese School, Kleberg’s paintings pay homage—yet with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their own conjuring. A frame within a frame within a frame. The pleasure is in the not-knowing. 

MATT KLEBERG was born in 1985 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2015. Coverage of his work can be found in various publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, Juxtapoz Magazine, Square Cylinder, and Hyperallergic. His work is featured in multiple private and public collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the AD&A Museum of the University of California Santa Barbara, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Matt Kleberg currently lives and works in San Antonio, TX.  

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Helen Berggruen @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

Helen Berggruen

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

June 26 – August 14, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by California artist Helen Berggruen. This marks Berggruen’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Helen Berggruen's paintings exude energetic universes—microworlds overflowing with character. Her full-spectrum palette and abundant use of mixed patterns and textures are packed with robust detail. Berggruen’s scenes feel familiar—landscapes, still lifes, and interiors reminiscent of the Post-Impressionists—her lively renderings animate the utilitarian into the fantastical through expressive gestures. Living room curtains twist; trees and florals reach and writhe. Streams of water and sky are filled with emphatic dabs of blue, yellow, and lavender.

Berggruen’s paintings sing with worlds beyond, with windows acting as portals to fictional universes just out of reach. In Powerlock, a desktop comes to life as everyday objects dance across its surface—paint brushes, scissors, and stacks of books abound. Tractors and trucks move hurriedly down Parisian cobblestones and through rural industrial landscapes; the storybook quality of Berggruen’s work playfully hints at narratives full of folly and adventure. Plucking her characters from her own drawings based on art historical sculptures and paintings, Hellen Berggruen breathes new life into her subjects, building stages and worlds in which they might self-actualize or drift into the cosmos through her painterly world-building. Filled with warmth and movement, her depictions of quotidian scenes become spirited worlds, each object and detail with its own allegorical significance; they act as celebrations of observation and rearrangement. Based in San Francisco, California, Helen Berggruen has exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Isca Greenfield-Sanders @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Cut from a Dream" Exhibition

Isca Greenfield-Sanders

Cut from a Dream

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

May 1 – June 19, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Cut from a Dream, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by New York-based painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders. 

Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ idyllic landscape paintings and works on paper depict fleeting moments of found and collected memories. Greenfield-Sanders' serene compositions take viewers through outdoor scenes of aerial beachscapes, lake coastlines, and open fields of wildflowers. While the artist typically works from 35-millimeter vintage slides from the 1950s–1960s, Cut From A Dream draws, for the first time, not only on found images but also on personal photography.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders shifts between representational and surreal chromatic choices in her work. In Red Wildflowers, 2025, the bright reds and greens of uncut flowers contrast against a cool blue sky, creating depth and movement; one can almost feel the quality of air as it moves through the patch of grass rustling the wildflowers. In Pink Lake, 2024 the deliberate use of Opera Pink as an overriding hue transforms a naturalistic scene into something surreal, tinted rosily like a holiday memory from childhood. The interplay between natural and stylized elements works to create atmospheric landscapes that feel both familiar and dreamlike–often punctuated by far off-figures just out of view. 

Exploring themes of collective memory, nostalgia, and the documentation of experience, Isca Greenfield-Sanders probes the nature of recollections as images are translated into various mediums. Beginning by gridding each photograph, she creates several studies in colored pencil and watercolor, which she then collages and paints over in oil. Through this additive process of layering opaque and transparent paints, hidden elements of the composition reveal themselves the longer one spends with the painting; reflecting in form how memories, like concealed layers, emerge, shift, and are re-shaped over time.  

Isca Greenfield-Sanders (b. 1978, New York) holds a dual degree in mathematics and visual arts from Brown University. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including a solo museum exhibition in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Greenfield-Sanders’s work is in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the USA Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Estée Lauder Corporation, New York, NY; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has been the subject of articles in several publications, including Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Val Britton @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Ghost Coast" Exhibition

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

www.berggruen.com

Michael Gregory @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Time Present, Time Past" Exhibition

Michael Gregory 

Time Present, Time Past 

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco 

January 11 - February 29, 2024 

Berggruen Gallery presents Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

For over two decades, Michael Gregory has been interested in rural landscapes and architecture informed by road trips across the country. This fascination is dually formal and social: the artist is interested in the geometric structures of these rural buildings “punctuating” the soft, natural world, as well as these buildings’ centrality to a national myth constructed by farmers, ranchers, and “builders” in rural America. Gregory’s paintings descend from archaeological impulses rather than commemorative ones—his paintings document shifts in the American wilderness and its relationship with human intervention, rather than forwarding an outright celebration of American culture or history. Formally, the orientation of many of Gregory’s paintings might make them more accurately described as portraits for the buildings and landscapes which they depict, but they can also be understood as fictional “artifacts” exploring the germination and decay of American ways of living alongside nature’s strength and perpetuity.

Though his work is representational, Michael Gregory takes inspiration from artists and movements across art history—he cites Bruegel, Rothko, Diebenkorn, Hopper, and the American Precisionists as influences. Michael Gregory also uses the concept of the “sublime” from the Romantic landscape painters of the19th century. The sublime’s awe-inspiring power recalls the stasis and fluidity of time, exposing the emotional underpinnings of time’s passage. The cultural familiarity with rural structures and landscapes appeals to the viewer’s sense of nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, or return, and algos, or pain—homesickness. Despite the fact that each image is created from Gregory’s imagination, by playing on these familiar, nostalgic atmospheres, Michael Gregory creates an equilibrium between past, present, and future, blurring temporal delineations to the degree that all points in time coalesce together. This dynamic recalls the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, from which the exhibition takes its name: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.” Michael Gregory’s paintings suggest that the past and future are occurring alongside the present, thereby reorienting our relationship to the lands on which we live and the histories we inhabit.

Michael Gregory was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, California. Gregory's work is included in many private and public collections, including the Boise Art Museum, Becton International Corporation, Delaware Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, Honolulu Advertiser Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, and the USEU Mission and Residence. Previously working from Bolinas, California, the artist currently lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com