John Waters Exhibition @ Rena Bransten, San Francisco - "The Worst of Waters - Works Never Before Exhibited in San Francisco The Rudest, The Hardest to Sell, The Just Plain Wrong"

JOHN WATERS: THE WORST OF WATERS

Works Never Before Exhibited in San Francisco

The Rudest, The Hardest to Sell, The Just Plain Wrong

Rena Bransten, San Francisco 

September 21 – November 16, 2024

JOHN WATERS  

Sexual Attraction, 2014 

C-prints, 12 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches (total)  

6 x 27 inches (image size), edition of 5

Rena Bransten Gallery presents The Worst of Waters, the fifth solo exhibition with JOHN WATERS, who the gallery represented in San Francisco since 2002.

A hit parade of hell, Waters’ photographic prints and sculptures use appropriated movie imagery that both mocks and embraces the extremes of the art world and show business all in one whoop of demented joy. Failed masculinity, anal trauma, Catholic rebellion, critical revenge, capital punishment, even children acting out a Grated video version of the X-rated film “Pink Flamingos”. It’s all here, on the walls, on the floor like leftover storyboards and damaged movie props abandoned by a B-list publicist who fled the industry. Waters considers this a group exhibition with only one artist: himself.

John Waters’ artwork has been shown in galleries and museums all over the world, starting with Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts, Co. in 1992. He’s had solo museum exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, among others. In 2011, John Waters was selected as a juror for the Venice Biennale.

Five books have been published on John Waters’ photographs and sculptures: Director’s Cut, 1997 (Scalo Books); John Waters: Change of Life, 2004 (Harry N. Abram); Unwatchable, 2006 (Marianne Boesky Gallery and de Pury & Luxembourg); John Waters – How Much Can You Take?, 2015 (Scheidegger & Spiess); and Indecent Exposure, 2018 (University of California Press).

John Waters’ artwork is in the permanent collection of several museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. 

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

renabranstengallery.com

John Bankston @ Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco - "20 Years in the Rainbow Forest" Exhibition

John Bankston 

20 Years in the Rainbow Forest

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

February 17 – April 20, 2024

Rena Bransten Gallery presents a selection of paintings from the last two decades by San Francisco based artist John Bankston. Deeply committed to expanding access to the Black imaginary, Bankston’s work provokes and entices as he suggests abstracted narratives through queer fantasy characters on their quests through the personified landscape of the Rainbow Forest.

John Bankston’s paintings are influenced by the visual language of coloring books, replete with recuring protagonists and locations. In his work, deep psychological and social issues are brought forth through eccentric characters often seen in costume – masks and animal suits – perhaps referencing group dynamics, personal identity, and the challenge of belonging both in nature and in society. Inspired by the many people and mini dramas encountered on his daily bus trips from home to studio, its own form of theater, Bankston’s unique sense of storytelling through art continues to be at the center of his practice. Paramount to this practice is the desire to create an inclusive version of the ubiquitous coloring book experience and allow all viewers an entry point to his stories. 

“When I was growing up, I saw very few African Americans of any sort in coloring books. Using a coloring book is something we all have in common. It's our first experience as visual creators. Coloring books reinforce accepted notions about how individuals are to be in society when they're adults. I hope my work sparks viewers to interrogate seemingly benign elements of our culture.” -From an interview with Sura Woods for the Bay Area Reporter (2012)

“Cloaked in the nostalgia of childhood, Bankston’s work defers to some imaginary time when race and sexuality were free of sociopolitical angst. For all the black children (myself included) who had trouble deciding how characters in coloring books ought to be colored, Bankston’s images dispel the anxiety associated with race-based identification as it was enforced in preschool and later internalized.” -Hamza Walker for Artforum (2002)

JOHN BANKSTON - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Benton Harbor, MI John Bankston received his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, he was invited to teach at Stanford University as a Holt Visiting Artist where taught a course on narrative painting. He maintained a studio on campus where he completed a monumental public commission for technology giant Meta. His work was featured in the solo exhibition, John Bankston: Painting as Storytelling at Stanford University’s Coulter Art Gallery. Bankston’s work has been included in several important museum shows such as On the Edge: Art of California, artwork from the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dream to Dream: The Art of John Bankston at the Krasl Art Center in St. Joseph, MI (catalog); California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach; Figure Studies: Recent Representational Works on Paper at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work continues to travel in the exhibition 30 Americans organized by the Rubell Collection in Miami which has been on display at several American and European museums since 2008. John Bankston’s work is in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Miami Art Museum, FL; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and Smith College Museum of Art, North Hampton, MA. John Bankston is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant and a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship.

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

renabranstengallery.com

Hung Liu, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco - Toward Peng-Lai

Hung Liu: Toward Peng-Lai

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

May 1 - June 7, 2003

Rena Bransten Gallery presents new paintings by Hung Liu in an exhibition called "Toward Peng-Lai" - toward paradise. Known for paintings drawn largely from Chinese historical photography, Liu's new works display a greater focus on what she calls the "mythic poses" that underlay the photographic surfaces of history. Representing such elemental human activities as laboring, eating, journeying, leaping, fighting, dreaming, and carrying one's burden, these "mythic poses" come from particular Chinese circumstances, but seem epic, tans-historical, and allegorical in the new works. With an overlay of traditional Chinese birds, flowers, insects, dragons, and - most recently - stylized human figures, Liu offers her subjects artistic evidence of their own rich heritage - as if to remind or comfort them.

Also included is a series of small, framed paintings of individual children - "The Baby Paintings." Each portrait has been culled from a single group photograph of Chinese girls attending a mission school in the late 19th century.

In effect, Liu turns old photographs into new paintings, liberating the rigid methodology of socialist realism - the style in which she was trained - as an improvisational painting style that dissolves the photo-realism of propaganda art into a fresh kind of history painting. She converts socialist realism into social realism.

Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up under the Maoist regime. She emigrated to the US in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. She currently lives in Oakland and is a tenured professor in the art department at Mills College. Her work is included in many major museum collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, The Dallas Museum of Fine Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, and locally, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museums.

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.renabranstengallery.com

Candida Höfer, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Candida Höfer

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

February 20 - March 22, 2003

Candida Höfer's photographs continue her careful cataloguing of public urban interiors. The absence of people in her pictures allows viewers to focus on the specifics of architecture, decorative and functional elements, furniture and other indicators of human engineering and aesthetic choice that reveal much about the absent choosers and users of the spaces. Besides the basic features of the rooms are the accidental relationships - amusing , surreal, ironic - that occur. Examples are the sad scene of a lone vase of flowers waving to a circle of chairs who appear to have turned their backs, and the rolling specimen tables unsure how to proceed in with a room full of similar tables lined up like soldiers.

Candida Höfer exhibits her work internationally and recently was included in Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. A traveling survey show in the United States is currently being organized by the Norton Museum of Art and the California State University, Long Beach, University Art Museum.

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.renabranstengallery.com

Rachael Neubauer, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco - New Work

Rachael Neubauer: New Work

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

November 21, 2002 - January 4, 2003

Rena Bransten Gallery presents an exhibit of new sculptures and drawings by Rachael Neubauer. Neubauer's new sculptures continue to dazzle and puzzle viewers. Their references seem always just out of thought-range - are they organic, technical, figurative, sub-cellular, models, jewelry or furniture? Neubauer describes the new works "as meditations on the material and the desirable." Using drawings to establish a conceptual framework, she invents a visual vocabulary of form, shape and color fusing imagery and source material. The resulting imagery is mysterious yet not unfamiliar, not predetermined but in the process of revealing itself.

Rachael Neubauer earned her MFA at Ohio State University and received a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA Award in 2000 and the Art Council Grant in 1999. Her work is included in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, The Oakland Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY

77 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.renabranstengallery.com