Anthony Meier

Anthony Meier is pleased to present sculptures by San Francisco-based artist Jesse Schlesinger (b. 1979) in conversation with paintings by São Paulo-based artist Manfredo de Souzanetto (b. 1947), underscoring their mutual reverence for material sources and commitment to ecological concerns. Each artist approaches their practice from a distinct cultural and geographical position, yet with a shared innovative exploration of form. As a second-generation carpenter, Schlesinger furthers and expands the unique relationship to labor and craftsmanship he inherited by incorporating new forms and modalities into his multidisciplinary work in sculpture, site-specific installation, drawing, and photography. His practice celebrates the transformation of salvaged materials—especially redwoods native to the Bay Area—into sculptural gestures that prompt environmental reflection. By pushing the boundaries of his chosen materials, he juxtaposes the natural with the artificial, such that smooth, curving ridges of organic materials—wood, stone, and ceramic—stand in stark contrast to the sharp, geometric constructions of concrete and brightly painted metals. The formal and aesthetic dichotomy that emerges within his work is a clear outgrowth of Schlesinger’s sources of inspiration amongst Northern California’s terrain, where he explores, for example, how the untamed Pacific Ocean meets the rigid, gridded structure of San Francisco’s city blocks along Ocean Beach. De Souzanetto has dedicated much of his practice to exploring the relationship between human intervention and the natural landscape. Born in the Jequitinhonha Valley of Minas Gerais in Brazil, de Souzanetto’s childhood exposed him to the raw beauty of materials such as granite, stone, and ceramics—elements that have deeply influenced his artistic trajectory. His ongoing commitment to ecological activism can be seen in his use of natural pigments sourced directly from the earth in his home state in Brazil. By incorporating these pigments into his paintings, de Souzanetto transforms his materials into the subject of his exploration and, in so doing, invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between color, form, and space. Both artists place great emphasis on the cultural and symbolic resonance of their materials, using them not only as physical substances but as carriers of meaning. Schlesinger’s locally salvaged wood and quarried stone, along with de Souzanetto’s natural pigments, are integral to each artist’s philosophy, reflecting the fragile, interdependent relationship between humans and the land. Via Schlesinger’s sweeping, organic forms and de Souzanetto’s vibrant, earth-toned canvases, each artist challenges the traditional boundaries of their mediums and invites contemplation of the tension between the human-made and natural worlds.

Anthony Meier, in collaboration with Mexico City-based collectible design gallery AGO Projects, is pleased to present the first U.S. solo exhibition of Brazilian artist and designer Rafael Triboli. Coinciding with FOG Design+Art, this showcase of functional works and one-of-a-kind domestic objects, alongside a curated selection of artworks by Josef Albers (1888-1976), JB Blunk (1926–2002), Donald Judd (1928-1994), and Agnes Martin (1912-2004) will be on view from January 21 to February 14, 2025. A self-taught artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, Triboli creates works that are both poetic and utilitarian, combining an innate material sensibility with a thoughtful exploration of industrial design and the traditions of woodworking. Rooted in an authenticity of material and craftsmanship, Triboli’s soulful sculptural objects—ranging from shaped chairs and hand-forged lamps to patterned folding screens, boxes, cabinets, and trays—are exactingly crafted from rich Brazilian mahogany and then adorned with intricate geometric carvings, painted motifs, serendipitous lacquer applications, and expressive inlays of cast bronze. When contextualized, in the exhibition, alongside Josef Albers’ exploration of color, a cast bronze sculpture by JB Blunk, and Donald Judd’s bi-color woodcut prints, Triboli’s modernist inspired and deeply personal practice comes into focus. His hand-carved and textured wooden boxes, cabinets, and functional objects resonate with Blunk’s curvilinear forms, reflecting a shared reverence for the natural world and the transformative qualities of its raw materials. Simultaneously, a dining table draws strength from its purity of form, evoking Judd’s geometric repetitions and legacy of functional design. Incorporating an element of luminosity, iridescent lighting fixtures, crafted in fluid organic compositions reminiscent of geological artifacts, transform the surrounding space. Infused with an artistry that enhances and transcends its form, each work reflects Triboli’s belief in the transformative power of art and design to foster connection and elevate experiences. By transmuting the raw, tactile allure of natural materials through the application of uninhibited, instinctive gestures, he redefines their essence. Each object that results emanates a quiet spirituality, as its visible markings and playful intricacies serve as a tangible record of the dialogue between maker and material. “We are pleased to partner with AGO Projects to present Rafael Triboli’s work within the context of Marin County and the area’s rich legacy of artistic exploration and deep connection to the natural environment, which has similarly been explored by such local artists as J.B. Blunk, Etel Adnan, and Jesse Schlesinger. This lineage is clearly reflected in Rafael’s idiosyncratic practice, where each piece fosters a distinct interplay between nature, material, and form. We look forward to introducing his work to a new audience that will connect with his resonant practice,” comments Anthony Meier. “The invitation to collaborate with Anthony Meier gallery, with its longstanding relationship to American minimalism and its deep artist roster is a true honor for AGO and Rafael. The Bay Area, a hub of creativity and making for generations, is the perfect place to invite collectors and design enthusiasts into the world of Rafael Triboli, an outstanding voice in the Brazilian contemporary design scene” add AGO Projects Co-founders Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Bay Area Music Village, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller, on view from November 7, 2024 to February 14, 2025, opening reception Saturday 16 November from 2 - 4 pm. Renowned for an oeuvre informed by a lifelong fascination with music and its power to shape identity and cultural dialogue, this exhibition represents a homecoming for the artist as it explores the vibrant cultural landscape of his roots in the Bay Area. Featuring new paintings set against a site-specific wall mural along with a reimagining of the artist’s record store installation, titled Record Pavilion 2.0—which will function as a fully operational record store throughout the duration of the show—Bay Area Music Village marks Muller’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, and his first solo presentation in Mill Valley. Often integrating his paintings into immersive multimedia environments, Muller anchors the exhibition with a large hand-painted wall mural that offers a personal and idiosyncratic account of the Bay Area’s musical history, intertwined with the artist’s own upbringing in the region from the 1960’s through the ’80’s. Spanning the gallery walls, this intuitively crafted work blends Muller’s experiences as a DJ and musician with scenic references from the decades he lived in the area and his extensive, near-encyclopedic knowledge of music history. Simultaneously referencing multiple eras, cultures and vistas, the mural connects the past, present, and future to depict a convergence of venues, gathering spaces, and experiences that serves as both a historical record and a psychological panorama of the Bay Area’s cultural landscape. Hung directly on the mural are new paintings from Muller’s Top Ten series, which through the portrayal of the album spines of ten records serve as veritable portraits of the individuals who chose them. As Muller draws upon his own extensive record collection for the Top Tens on view, these new works function as self-portraits that reflect on his personal relationship with music over the years, from his first concert to pivotal live performances, and the albums he played as a college radio DJ. In each painting Muller renders record spines as tall as the chooser, encapsulating a personal journey while also highlighting the shared experience and collective influence of the musical histories it represents. The exhibition additionally features a new selection of Muller’s Disco Ball paintings, which reflect and refract various musical environments. Muller photographs an 8” disco ball in these spaces, then enlarges the image in paint so that viewers can see the reflections in each square of the ball’s painted surface. Depicting shifting permutations of light, angle, and context, these works capture the colors, angles, and spirit of their site as subject—expanding the exhibition’s exploration of the cultural and spatial dimensions of music. Situated next door is Record Pavilion 2.0, installed in the gallery’s front window vitrine. First showcased in Los Angeles in 2022, this stage-set/record-store/sculpture is stocked with records from Muller’s vast personal collection. A sound system, checkout desk, and paintings of various ephemera—posters, promo materials, zines—complete the record store vibe. Reflecting Muller’s interest in the boundaries between performance, exhibition and life, the structure’s open design—which transports the collective energy of the many record stores and music spaces where the artist has spent countless hours—is fully functional. The records are for sale through the run of the exhibition. Inviting interaction throughout the duration of the exhibition, Record Pavilion 2.0 fosters discovery, collective memory, and the exchange that’s emblematic of music itself.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Quiet Riot, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain. Curling and draping, beaded and bursting, in these fresh paintings pools of color simmer and explode into angles that shiver with glitter. A suite of canvases swerve from the walls, a mobile of talismans wave with prosperity, and a work on site swallows the floor with its surge of color. All of it a spirited dance through the grind and joy, politics and pain of life, with plenty of feline licks and not one of dogma. The small jokes, the big emotions, moments of golden admiration and graffiti’ed frustration, all poured through the time and effort of making that loosens into freedom, all the effort that sets the stage for effortless action, a tap into the transformation that underlies reality. Oft described as “exuberant”, the work of Sarah Cain is more than just lively but alive. The practice of the everyday transcribed with color and material. A palette that eats tacky and sentiment and prejudice and spits color into the face of power. Follow the rainbow of Cain’s storied career into this curve and you’ll see her rebellious sprays and pigments ascend and blossom. A sharpening skill, a refined confidence that learns with each painting how to better release. And certainly these paintings are riotous. A multitude that refuses complacency, but a riot that can only be summoned and maintained by the meditations of this singular painter, laying it on thick, day-by-day, as she quietly works her way forward. Whether in perception or politics, progress like this can only be made by a billion women and one. - Andrew Berardini

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Caragh Thuring’s third exhibition at the gallery, showcasing the London-based artist’s exploration of Mount Tamalpais, the iconic Northern California peak in Marin County. On view from 23 May to 28 June 2024, the exhibition marks Thuring’s first-ever showcase of entirely small-scale works. The 18 paintings that comprise the show deepen the artist’s vibrant and layered investigation of the interplay between natural and human made worlds. For this new body of work, Thuring depicts the majestic Mount Tamalpais – studying it in books, sifting through source material and discovering its history from afar - without ever setting foot on its soil, five thousand miles away in London. Thuring is renowned for her spare and abstracted representations of industrial structures, boundary lines and the body’s recognition of the disjunctive or in-between. Previously working on large-scale canvases of untreated linen and bespoke woven cloth, her paintings reassemble motifs such as brickwork, volcanoes, pyramids and architecture. Here, Thuring integrates Mount Tamalpais into her lexicon. Despite the mountain’s non-volcanic nature, the artist exploits a common misconception and presents it as such, serving her fascination with volcanic phenomena - a recurring and pervasive theme in her work. Symbolising mythological, perilous, and life-sustaining forces, volcanoes are silent yet ominous while dormant, spontaneously erupting with cataclysmic force, and ultimately yielding to a verdant renewal. Mount Tamalpais previous but eroded history bears the scars of a cold war base, ‘the crookedest railroad in the world’ and other human traverses and alterations. Thuring paints various viewpoints, scales and perspectives of the mountain, concocting a recognisable yet complex yearning or romantic envisioning, reinforcing the clash between human intervention and landscape and their mutual battle for domination.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present our second solo exhibition by West Coast Light and Space pioneer Larry Bell (b. 1939) on view from February 8 to April 12, 2024. Continuing Bell’s adept utilization of glass and light, which enables him to broaden the visual and physical realms of perception through his sculptures, this exhibition will feature a new large-scale work that debuts a wholly new composition amongst his oeuvre as well as a monumental installation. In shades of red and blue, these works evidence his iconic methodology characterized by endless spontaneity, intuition, and improvisation.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Refrain, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Jessie Henson whose practice blurs boundaries between media by fusing the vernaculars of drawing, sculpture, and embroidery. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery since the announcement of her representation in November 2022, Refrain will be on view from 9 November 2023 through 19 January 2024.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Emerging States, Erica Deeman’s third exhibition at the gallery, which will continue her multidisciplinary practice that engages with the hybridity of Black diasporic identity, journeys, and the passage of her maternal family from Jamaica to the United Kingdom as part of the Windrush Generation. On view from 7 September to 20 October 2023, the exhibition features a new series of photographs that further expand upon the artist’s experiments in portraiture and includes a new sculptural neon work Points of Memory from her Being series in the gallery’s exhibition window facade.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present What’s that about, a group exhibition curated by gallery artist Saif Azzuz - on view from 1 June – 11 August 2023. Predominantly featuring contemporary Bay Area artists whose practices have intersected with Azzuz’s during his time in the region—such as Teresa Baker, Libby Black, Ernesto Burgos, Cross Lypka, Conrad Guevara, Jennifer Blackmon Guevara, Clifford Hengst, Eamon Ore-Giron, Jay Payton, Grace Rosario Perkins and Lucy Puls—the exhibition additionally includes work by historical figures who share in certain conceptual and material resonances, including Melvin Edwards and Rosie Lee Tompkins.

Anthony Meier is pleased to present "Something About Shapes", Kate Shepherd’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery which will feature never-before-seen watercolors and large-scale wall paintings, all of which have been created in dialogue with their environment. On view from 7 April - 19 May 2023, this is the gallery’s second exhibition at its new flagship location in Mill Valley, California. As the first exhibition dedicated to Shepherd’s ongoing series of watercolors, "Something About Shapes" reflects the artist’s time-honored practice of geometrical abstraction that teases out subtle relationships between form and space which might otherwise remain overlooked. Her distinct visual lexicon, generated by superimposing a delicate matrix of chromatic fields to evoke the illusion of three-dimensionality, characterizes both bodies of work, the watercolors and wall drawings alike. Taking as their inspiration the trap doors found along city sidewalks and folding walls, the series of watercolors on view all reflect a certain architectural quality in their arrangement of overlapping and intersecting planes—alluding to stagnated movement and different points of view, exemplified by "Violet, Three Overlapping Planes #77" (2022), a door standing ajar, as in "Brown, Open Door with Plane, #65", (2022), or a wall partition bisecting an otherwise undelineated space, such as in "Black, Open Folded Wall, #43" (2022). The play of light and shadow that results from Shepherd’s delicate manipulation of color in these intimately-scaled monochromatic works share a certain kinship with the literal play of light and shadow that she engages in her large-scale wall paintings. Though similarly drawing upon the planar relationship as a sort of formal conceit, the wall paintings establish a far more direct spatial discourse, compelling a consideration of the viewer’s phenomenological relationship both inside and outside of the work. The viewer is engaged with a larger-than-life figural and gestural reference, suggesting both gravity and motion.

On view from 31 January through 17 March 2023, "In the Shadow of Mt. Tam" will feature historic works by artists such as Etel Adnan, who spent a finite but critically important time in Marin County––and who eventually went on to establish themselves within the cannons of art history. Artists include Etel Adnan, JB Blunk, Jess Collins, Jay DeFeo, Robert Duncan, Gordon Onslow Ford, Luchita Hurtado, David Ireland, Lee Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Wolfgang Paalen, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Lawrence Weiner, William T. Wiley, and Rick Yoshimoto. The exhibition will thread together the allure of Marin’s distinctive natural environment and Mt. Tam itself, as well as the impact of community and place on these artist’s burgeoning practices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog featuring an essay by art historian Michael Auping.