Gabrielle Graessle @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "True Romance" Exhibition

Gabrielle Graessle: True Romance 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena 

July 26 – August 30, 2025 

Gabrielle Graessle

24 hours of daytona ferrari, 2024 

Acrylic glitter and spray on canvas 

50.50h x 140.50w x 1.25d in 

128.27h x 356.87w x 3.18d cm

© Gabrielle Graessle, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery

Simchowitz presents True Romance, a solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings by Swiss artist Gabrielle Graessle, at Hill House, Pasadena. 

Gabrielle Graessle lives and works in a small village in southern Spain, where her creative practice is deeply entwined with her daily life—her home, her studio, her dogs, and her inner world. Her paintings reflect this porous relationship between self and setting. Her home is not a retreat from the world, but a stage upon which her distinctive visual language comes to life. Often working across multiple larger-scale canvases at once, Gabrielle Graessle constructs her compositions through layers of memory and imagination. She doesn’t aim for literal depiction but seeks instead an emotional truth: a vivid evocation of the energy, glamour, and strangeness that memories can hold.

In True Romance, a series of automobiles takes center stage—sleek, stylized, and brimming with narrative. The works trace back to a childhood memory of her father’s best friend, Hans G., a flamboyant figure who drove a Mini Cooper for everyday use and a Ferrari and Lamborghini for everything else. Though the exact models have faded from memory, the impression remains. The cars are icons—not just of luxury, but of a time, a place, and a masculine mythos that shaped her early understanding of adulthood.

This memory unfolds into another: her father’s annual pilgrimages to the Geneva Auto Salon, returning home with stacks of glossy catalogs and previews of the year’s newest models. Gabrielle Graessle absorbed the visual culture that surrounded these events—the polished chrome, the theatrical presentation, the women in miniskirts with rehearsed smiles. Her painting Salon de Genève sans hôtesse, for example, critically and playfully reimagines these scenes by omitting the ubiquitous “hostess,” calling attention to the spectacle and its gendered constructions. 

Gabrielle Graessle’s interest in pop-cultural iconography—particularly cars like the Ford GT 40 and Ferrari Daytona—places her work in conversation with Pop Art’s fascination with consumer spectacle. But unlike Warhol’s mechanical detachment, Graessle’s paintings retain a hand-drawn urgency and personal resonance. Her use of acrylic, glitter, spray paint, and exaggerated proportions suggests a blend of Pop’s visual vernacular with the raw, instinctive energy of Art Brut and outsider traditions. 

While her subject matter is rooted in both pop culture and personal history, Gabrielle Graessle’s deeper project is an exploration of raw, intuitive expression—unfiltered by academic theory or aesthetic polish. There is a childlike (but never childish) spontaneity in her work: a deliberate return to freedom, where conventional rules dissolve. This spirit is echoed in her materials and occasional text, applied in ways that are both purposeful and instinctive. Vivid colors dominate, not to seduce, but to assert. Her canvases are expansive, immersing the viewer in a world that is at once intimate and strikingly universal. Each work feels less like a standalone image and more like a piece of a larger constellation—a story unfolding in nonlinear fragments. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own memories, projections, and associations into the work. Interpretation becomes a shared act, echoing the layered, open-ended nature of her compositions: ambiguous, playful, and charged with possibility.

True Romance captures the texture of a life filtered through decades of image-making. These are not documents of reality, but of feeling—records of what lingers rather than what occurred. The result is a world both strange and familiar, painted not from observation, but from what refuses to be forgotten.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com

Douglas Knesse @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "Harvest under the sun" Exhibition

Douglas Knesse 

Harvest under the sun 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena

July 26 – August 30, 2025

Douglas Knesse 

I think I saw a paradise, 2024 

Oil stick and acrylic painting on truck tarp. 

74h x 62w x 1.25d in / 187.96h x 157.48w x 3.18d cm

© Douglas Knesse, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery 

Simchowitz presents Harvest under the sun, Douglas Knesse’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena.

Harvest under the sun is a meditative exploration of discipline, devotion, and transformation. For Douglas Knesse, who lives and works in a coastal city along Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, painting is more than expression—it is a quiet, enduring practice and a form of spiritual communication. “Painting has always been a way for me to communicate what words could not reach,” he says. “It is in this quiet space that I connect with the spiritual field, accessing the divine to give thanks, to lay down my fears, to ask, and to speak new paths into existence.”

Knesse’s layered compositions resist finality. Built through repetition and reflection, they evolve, bearing traces of previous gestures. Working across acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, and pastel, he balances vibrant color and organic forms with generous use of negative space. Many works are painted on truck tarps—surfaces marked by use and history—which bring a grounded, corporeal quality to the paintings and deepen their relationship to labor, weathering, and renewal.

His imagery—leaf forms, rhythmic notations, and transient blooms—draws from the natural world but also points inward, toward an interior field of spiritual attunement. In works like TINHA UMA PALMEIRA NA PAISAGEM I, and the cloud drew my strength, this tension between external landscape and internal transformation becomes palpable.

Knesse’s practice resonates with multiple currents in art history. The gestural immediacy of his mark-making evokes Abstract Expressionism, while his use of modest materials and nontraditional supports—particularly in works like Window to paradise and Eruption and garden flowers—recalls the poetic materiality of Arte Povera. At the same time, his quiet emphasis on presence, perception, and process aligns him with Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, whose works foregrounded sensorial experience and personal transformation.

Though rooted in a specific ecology, the exhibition speaks broadly to cycles of effort and emergence. Each piece carries the memory of what came before and the potential of what may come next. These works honor unseen labor: the slow accumulation of energy, gesture, and faith that precede visible change. Rather than seeking resolution, Douglas Knesse creates space for uncertainty, stillness, and spiritual inquiry. In this way, Harvest under the sun offers more than paintings—it provides a patient, reverent record of becoming.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com

Artist Holly Lowen @ Simchowitz, Pasadena - "Etanglement" Exhibition + Selected Sculptures by Stan Edmonson + Selected Works by Ken Taylor Reynaga

Holly Lowen: Entanglement

Simchowitz Hill House, Pasadena

February 23 – March 30, 2025

Simchowitz presents Entanglement, Holly Lowen’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena. HOLLY LOWEN shares her latest body of work, an evocative exploration of evolutionary psychology, sport, and domestication through the dynamic interplay of figuration and abstraction.

Raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Holly Lowen holds a BA in Art History from Duke University and a degree in Interior Architecture from The New School. Currently completing her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, Lowen works across pen, charcoal, oil, and pastel, crafting compositions that delve into the complexities of human and animal behavior.

Lowen’s work reflects a continuous evolution, beginning with experi­mentation in abstraction rooted in figuration. Her early pieces play with color, form, and composition, deconstructing the subject to explore emotional resonance beyond literal representation.

A pivotal shift is evident in her “Flamingo Series,” which investigates defense mechanisms in the natural world—spikes, scales, and other protective traits—and their psychological parallels in humans. Flamingos, emblematic of both grace and vulnerability, become metaphors for self-protection, their intertwined forms symbolizing mutual defense and the fragility inherent in connection.

Her exploration deepens with an introspective series examining the psychological landscape of tennis—a sport she views as a fascinating study in controlled aggression and social performance. The sterile uniformity of all-white attire, the isolated confines of the court, and the tension veiled beneath polite decorum evoke themes of repression and release.

Holly Lowen dissects the mental rigor and existential underpinnings of the sport, viewing it as a microcosm of human struggle—where precision, repetition, and control are both liberating and confining—a reference to scholarship on sport and sports psychology, such as David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays written on tennis titled “String Theory”.

Her entangled figures, set within formalized social structures, challenge perceptions of societal norms and boundaries. Inspired by the dynamic battle scenes of Peter Paul Rubens and Old Master studies, Holly Lowen reinterprets these influences through a contemporary lens, crafting a haunting critique of polite society’s suppression of passion and aggression.

Holly Lowen’s paintings interrogate the paradox of human nature: the coexistence of civility and primal instinct. Her work reveals the contained animal within, navigating the thin line between composure and chaos.

Similarly, Albert Camus’ reflections on sports psychology resonate through her work, particularly his view of sports as a metaphor for the absurdity of human existence. Camus explored how athletic endeavors embody the tension between the repetitive pursuit of perfection and the inherent meaninglessness of that pursuit, mirroring the broader existential struggle. For Holly Lowen, this manifests in the portrayal of tennis as both a disciplined ritual and an absurd exercise in controlled aggression, revealing the fragility of societal structures and the human desire to impose order on chaos.

STAN EDMONSON: Selected Sculptures

An outdoor presentation of sculptures by Stan Edmondson will be on view throughout the property, providing a wonderful opportunity to engage with Edmondson’s sculpture in an open-air setting.

 

Stan Edmondson (b. 1962, Pasadena, CA), lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  Grounded in the Bauhaus philosophy of integrating craft and fine art, Edmondson works primarily with homemade clay, embracing both aesthetic and technical complexities.

Also on view an ongoing exhibition of Selected Works by KEN TAYLOR REYNAGA, in the Simchowitz Small Barn.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, California 91104

www.simchowitz.com

Artist Peter Burns @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena, CA - "Forests of the Night" Exhibition

Peter Burns: Forests of the Night 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena 

June 1 – July 6, 2024

Peter Burns

Wave, 2022

Oil on canvas

16.14h x 16.14w in / 41h x 41w x 2d cm

© Peter Burns, courtesy Simchowitz Gallery

Simchowitz Gallery presents “Forests of the Night”, a debut solo show by artist Peter Burns. The exhibition is on view at the gallery’s newest location - Hill House, Pasadena.

Hailing from the picturesque landscapes of Ireland, Peter Burns’ oil paintings contain elements of sculpture and collage that emanate mythic tales. With this body of work Burns deftly navigates the interplay of light and dark, while seamlessly exploring the complexities of scale and perspective. Evoking the enchantment of fairy tales, Burns successfully transports viewers to fantastical realms.

Spellbinding and occasionally unsettling, ‘Forests of the Night’ captures the imagination by weaving together the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the painting Wave, 2022, a minuscule rowboat battles against the fierce embrace of an enormous wave, whose foamy tendrils extend like arms and eerie eyes seem to observe. Despite the tumultuous sea, the golden hue of the sky imbues the scene with an unexpected sense of safety.

Peter Burns intertwines religion, classical and science fiction through a dislocation of scale and the creation of exotic landscapes. In Abraham and Isaac, 2022, two diminutive figures mounted on animals ride alongside an ominous canyon, flanked by a disproportionately massive mountain scape painted in a mesmerizing array of pink, green, and yellow hues, under a sky aglow with cosmic illumination. The tactile quality of the art, along with its almost three-dimensional layers of paint, draws you in, inviting closer inspection. Peter Burns has an MFA in painting and a BA in sculpture from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He has exhibited in solo shows and group shows internationally and is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant. 

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE, PASADENA

Pasadena, CA 91107

www.simchowitz.com

Leila Spilman @ Simchowitz Pasadena - Lotsa Love Exhibition

Leila Spilman: Lotsa Love

Simchowitz Pasadena

June 8 – July 13, 2023

Simchowitz presents Lotsa Love by Leila Spilman (b. 1994 Santa Fe, New Mexico), who currently lives and works in Montana. It features nearly a dozen artworks that expand on the artist’s deeply felt, personal dialogue.

For the past decade, Leila Spilman has been in a relentless pursuit of artistic inquiry and innovation. She admits to having “few constants” in her life, “Being around a camera has been an important constant in my life, and that all started with my grandpa.” Alden Spilman (b. 1945, NY) is known to use uncommon technologies, such as some of the first color photocopiers and computer graphics, and the manipulation of printers and printing techniques. Spilman says, “He would just shoot his camera without looking through the viewfinder. He was all about chance and letting go. And that—and his whole attitude toward making art—has been a huge influence on me.”

Leila Spilman, who went into foster care at an early age, says that “making art has been an amazing way to reconnect with my family.” Leila Spilman’s grandfather taught her the importance of “play” in art making and the importance of life-as-art. Lotsa Love, in essence, is a love letter to him and his artistic practice. It began organically, with Leila Spilman coming across images in his studio, images that had been degraded by moisture, mold and light, images that had no plan for use. Leila Spilman applied various chemicals to each, pressing them between sheets of plexi, and letting them degrade further. That process produced a number of hazy, mysterious images that she later rescanned and printed. Some hint at backyard gardens and/or idyllic, dreamlike, organic worlds that mirror their biotic processes. These works are neither wholly abstract nor wholly representational, nor are they clearly photographs or paintings. They exist somewhere in between. For Leila Spilman, they can also be seen as portals into her past and future. They tap into the “deepest relationship of her life” as she describes her relationship to her grandfather, while representing a new phase of her art-making. While she has explored the idea of corrosion and toxicity in the past, it takes on even greater weight in this new body of work. As she says, the process of “throwing something toxic on something beautiful” can be read as a metaphor for some of the trauma that has haunted her family.

SIMCHOWITZ PASADENA

2785 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107

www.simchowitz.com

Jan-Henri Booyens @ Simchowitz Gallery, Los Angeles - Deflector Ray

Jan-Henri Booyens: Deflector Ray

Simchowitz, Los Angeles

May 25 – June 24, 2023

Simchowitz presents Deflector Ray, the first solo show of the South African artist Jan-Henri Booyens (b.1980) in Los Angeles. The title comes from Star Trek, suggesting an inherent contradiction—a type of force field that can be used to absorb and protect, while at the same time, shooting outward to destroy and kill. It’s a fitting notion for an artist whose practice can be defined by contrast, discord and the unexpected.

Based in Cape Town, Jan-Henri Booyens’ medium-to-large scale paintings have often drawn comparisons to the work of early-to-late Modernists, not only because of his interest in Surrealist automatism, but because they exemplify the sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical side of action painting—with odd collisions of materials, tonalites and movements. Indeed, his work is nothing if not a celebration of the spontaneous, full of charge and flow.

But in truth, his practice is clearly the product of contemporary times. Hip-Hop, street culture, digital technologies and African Afrocentrism are all cogent factors in his aesthetic, as well as the constant inspiration he gets from outright experimentation. One can hear a faint echo of Italian Futurism who famously considered industrial life a thing of beauty, where car engines, machines, telephones and electricity provided an ongoing symphony. The parallel today, at least for Jan-Henri Booyens, is the celebration of glitches, application errors, system crashes, data moshing and the like. “I’m really interested in the error,” he says, “the beauty of the error, and the beauty of the mistake. Those are really important to me.”

To that end, Jan-Henri Booyens has been “destroying images” as he says, for the past 15 years. He might, for example, pull an image from the web and then feed it into a program that allows him to transform it into code or sound. (A jpeg might be translated into ASCII for example, or WAV). Then, after cutting and pasting, editing and deleting, he exports it back out as an image file (jpeg or gif) to create strange, colorful abstractions that are full of glitches and corrupted pixels. Few if any, serve as models for paintings, but rather inspirations. They’re “successful failures,” he explains. “Or maybe a kind of psychic autism—a release that somehow gets fucked up in the process of being made.”

Similarly, he invites chance collisions to occur during the process of painting. He generally works with unprimed canvas, because, as he says, he enjoys the ways in which different pigments absorb into the surface at different rates and transparency. He will also mix oil paint with different types of spray paint, or add cold wax to build up the surface, which he may or may not scrape away. He will also weave in brush strokes, hard-edged lines, and calligraphic marks. He has even turned to reflective elements, such as glitter or metallic dust, which have never been popular with most artists. But such collisions often coalesce into something more lyrical and rhythmic, something that keeps us looking over and over. Lisa Le Feuvre’s exploration of failure seems fitting here, “We can sometimes only become truly attentive,” she writes, “when something is indeed wrong.”

Likewise, he enjoys throwing people off track with his titles as well, which often suggest specific intentions or inspirations (“Cy Twombly Broke My Heart” or “Joseph Beuys Was a Liar”). But as Jan-Henri Booyens says, they only come after the work is completed, or perhaps, while they’re being made. Some might riff on a random song lyric or nursey rhyme, while others might play with common street slang. (“Onder in die Vlei, Het Hy Haar Siektes” translates from Afrikaans to Down in the valley he gets all of her diseases and “Hos …. Indota!” translates from Sabela, a language developed in prison, to something like ‘hello… your highness,’ but ‘your highness’, or indota, means ‘a person with a high ranking’, where the higher the prison sentence, the higher the ranking)

If Africa plays a role in his work, Jan-Henri Booyens admits to being aware of his country’s well documented contribution to the birth of European abstraction in the 1920s, but as he confesses, he also had to reconcile his relationship to his country’s long tradition of politicizing artworks. “I turned to abstraction partly as a reaction to all that,” he recalls. “I’ve always been against narrative art and more interested in works that are more open-ended.”

Nevertheless, South Africa has in fact inspired a few epiphanies. One for example happened during what is known as “loadshedding,” which is a practice of widespread blackouts conducted by Eskom, the country’s main energy company, to avoid the collapse of the grid. That meant the lights would go off every three hours, which eventually inspired Jan-Henri Booyens, out of frustration, to work with glow-in-the-dark paint. “Now I really like the idea that a collector might have a work in his or her home, and at some point, after they turn off the lights, they discover that they have an entirely different painting.”

Born in Johannesburg in 1980, Jan-Henri Booyens lives and works in Cape Town. He studied at the Durban Institute of Technology and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and has taught in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Stellenbosch. Booyens was one- third of the infamous artist collective Avant Car Guard and his work is part of numerous collections, including the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. His solo exhibitions include ‘WHITEOUT’ (2015) at Blank Projects and ‘Some Kind of Nature’ (2014). “Deflector Ray” is his first solo show in the U.S.

Jan-Henri Booyens’ work is often described in terms of a struggle between the representational and abstract, the rational and chaotic. His affinity and critical engagement with Modernism is coupled with his relationship to the South African landscape, both physical and social, manifesting in an intuitive, texture-rich layering of oil paint on canvas and a bold use of colour andline. Booyens incorporates his experimentation with street art, photography, and digital ‘Glitch Art’ and GIFs into his canvasses, as seen in his solo presentations at blank projects, ‘WHITEOUT’ (2015) and ‘Some Kind of Nature’ (2014). He was one-third of the iartist collective Avant Car Guard, who employed paint, photography and sculpture to offer a satirical critique of South Africa’s art world.

SIMCHOWITZ DTLA

727 East Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90021

www.simchowitz.com

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