Berggruen Gallery

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Diana Al-Hadid: Nothing Against Paper, an exhibition of panels, works on paper, and bronzes by Syrian-born, New York-based artist, Diana Al-Hadid. This show marks Al Hadid’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view September 26 through October 31, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 26 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Cut, Split, Horizon, an exhibition of new paintings by Heather Day. This show marks the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from August 1 through September 19, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, August 1 from 5 to 7 PM. In her paintings, Heather Day explores landscape, the figure, memory, and sensation through surges of unabashed color, cut and sewn into biomorphic shapes which split and commandeer the canvas. At once harmonious and confrontational, Day’s paintings tangle with the relationship between the material and the conceptual, considering the indescribable phenomena which define our emotional and sensorial perceptions of our surroundings. In some respects a nomadic artist—while Day grew up in Hawaii, she was previously based in Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco, and now lives and works in the Mojave Desert—Day frequently mines her surrounding landscape for artistic inspiration, translating them into flowing washes deliberately arranged to incite the phenomenological experiences offered by these environments, rather than their objective realities. Her paintings simultaneously investigate the relationship between perception and memory through a unique process defined by abstraction and reconstruction. Building on the foundation of pioneering Abstract artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Day’s process relies greatly on the elasticity and malleability of acrylic paint, exploiting its material qualities as a means of expressing emotion and sensation. Often working with acrylic paint at its most fluid, Day pools, washes, sponges, scrubs, and scrapes paint across canvas, before cutting into the surface and stitching the resulting shapes into new arrangements, adjoining the pieces in undulating, curvilinear shapes before affixing the final result to rectangular stretcher bars. This tedious reorganization affords her artworks an infrastructural stability that contrasts with the aqueous spread of the paint, resulting in paintings that are visceral, cerebral, and atmospheric, attenuating the divisions between reality and human perception of reality. Heather Day (b. 1989) received her Bachelor of Fine Art in 2012 from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland where she studied painting and art history. Select solo and group presentations include Almine Rech, Paris (2024), Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023), Art Basel, Miami (2023), The Armory Show, New York (2023), The Pit, Los Angeles (2022), among others. Day’s work has been featured in Art Forum’s must see (2020) and Galerie Magazine’s “Next Big Thing” (2022). Her paintings can be found in collections such as Fort Wayne Museum of Art and The Macedonia Institute. Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon, August 1 – September 19, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Tom McKinley. This show marks the artist's ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from August 1 through September 19, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, August 1 from 5 to 7 PM. Featuring paintings from various series, the works showcased in Tom McKinley depict luxury architecture and idyllic landscapes. Open-air homes adorned with iconic art and designer furniture stand against fields of luscious greenery or endless crystalline seas, demonstrating the artist’s lifelong fascination with contemporary architecture. Devoid of figures, McKinley’s paintings act as celebrations of design and architectural achievement rather than documentation of human habitation. While McKinley’s paintings emphasize the tranquility and harmony generated by precisely arranged interiors and architecture, moments of surrealism and absurdity occasionally arrive unexpectedly, such as the crown in Mid July and the floating moon of Moon on a Lake, showcasing the artist’s imaginative approach to hyperrealism. McKinley’s newest paintings transition from depictions of interiors or architecture into pure landscape. In Morning August 1st, the bows of fifteen boats point toward the open expanse of a body of water as rolling hills drape the scene’s outer edges. A scenic horizon rises above the water, mirroring the pattern of its light. Much like his architectural paintings, Morning August 1st demonstrates a profound talent for creating visual unity that is apparent throughout McKinley’s career, now updated to a include sublime vantage. Tom McKinley was born in Bay City, Michigan and was educated in both the United States and Europe. Beginning at the Goddard Collage in Vermont, he continued his education overseas in England at the Falmouth School of Art in Falmouth, the Ravensbourne College of Art in London, and Brighton Polytechnic in Brighton. McKinley currently lives and works in Oakland, California. Tom McKinley, August 1 – September 19, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present our summer invitational, California Gold, an exhibition that celebrates Californian history, iconography, and culture. The show will be on view from June 20 through July 25, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Thursday, June 20, from 5 to 7 pm. California Gold invites artists with ties to California to engage with the Golden State, expressing a diverse set of viewpoints and relationships. From the Gold Rush to Hollywood opulence to tech booms and busts, California Gold speaks to the state’s status as a cultural center for the United States and beyond, with its rich landscapes entrenched in influential history. The show pays special homage to the contemporary renaissance of San Francisco’s post-pandemic art scene, celebrating the city as a site of artistic optimism and renewal.     Exhibiting Artists:  Tauba Auerbach | John Baldessari | Larry Bell | Helen Berggruen | Sarah Blaustein | Katherine Boxall | Val Britton | Christopher Brown | Andy Burgess | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Adriane Colburn | Travis Collinson | Mark di Suvero | June Edmonds | Charles Gaines | Daniel Gibson | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Michael Gregory | Stephen Hannock | Sarah Hotchkiss | Seth Kaufman | Clare Kirkconnell | Matt Kleberg | Anna Kunz | Charles Lee | Barry McGee | Klea McKenna | Tom McKinley | Richard Misrach | Nicole Mueller | Ed Ruscha | Richard Serra | Jillian Shea | Stephanie H. Shih | Kyle Warren Smith | Joni Sternbach | Marie Thibeault | Dani Tull | Darren Waterston | Griff Williams | Jonas Wood | Christopher Woodcock California Gold, June 20 – July 25, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781- 4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present A Life in Fields, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Darren Waterston. This show marks Waterston’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from May 2 through June 13, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 2, from 5 to 7 PM. The gallery will also host an artist walkthrough on Friday, May 3, at 3 PM. Darren Waterston’s A Life in Fields envisions the landscape genre as an enigmatic investigation of human consciousness. Through symphonic sweeps of color, Waterston creates “devotional” paintings and works on paper that rely on the sublime to survey the human psyche. Each painting embraces the unresolved nature of conscious experience, using color as a stepping stone towards investigating our psychological interiorities.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Polyphonic, a group exhibition of recent works by Minku Kim, Nicole Mueller, and Marie Thibeault. The show will be on view from May 2 through June 13, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artists on Thursday, May 2, from 5 to 7 PM. Taken from the Greek, polyphony means “many sounds,” used in musicology to describe music in which two or more distinct melodies are performed synchronously. Seizing this choral term for the visual arts, Polyphonic unites three contemporary abstract artists—Minku Kim, Nicole Mueller, and Marie Thibeault—to showcase the simultaneously disparate and intersecting dialogues put forth by abstract art, where arrangements of geometry and gesture speak to, and collide at, unique intervals of visual form and discursive intention. The exhibition examines each artists’ work individually and as parts of a orchestral whole, encouraging spectators to link and consider their dynamic relations, paradoxes, and reciprocities. Their concerns are both formal and social: Nicole Mueller’s paintings explore color through prismatic blooms and bursts, placed alongside the delicate stability of Minku Kim’s Sarang series. Meanwhile, Thibeault’s works investigate the tolls of climate change through effusive detonations of color and texture. Together, their works fuse in an astonishing entanglement of beauty, discord, and exegesis.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Straight Loops, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from March 7 through April 25, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 7, from 5:00 to 7:00pm. In Straight Loops, Paul Kremer continues to stretch the bounds of organic form, working against strict definition in visual language or media, and towards a recognition of its inherent fluidity, especially in the abstracted form. This approach reveals the verisimilitude of visual identification between objects, thereby reconfiguring their symbolic and material relationships. Kremer’s process begins with shape rather than subject---this shape is conjured from his imagination, which is continually modeled, formed, and re-formed until Kremer is pleased with the final shape. Once setting the shape, Kremer continues applying and experimenting with color. It is only at the painting’s finish that Kremer titles his work, thus imposing a relation, and identity, onto the painted form.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Architecture in Art, a group exhibition featuring works by Lucy Williams, Tom McKinley, and Bruce Cohen. Architecture in Art will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Abstract Perspectives, a group exhibition that highlights underrepresented voices in the world of contemporary abstract art. Abstract Perspectives will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. This curated collection furthers abstract artwork as a vital means of expression and social commentary beyond representational or stylized subject matter. While the artworks vary widely in size, media, and style, the entire show celebrates abstract art as a resistant break from convention, continually stretching the boundaries of visual language and aesthetics.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce 'Jane Hammond: Endless Forms Most Beautiful,' an exhibition of new collage works. This show marks her second solo exhibition with the gallery. 'Jane Hammond: Endless Forms Most Beautiful' will be on view from October 19 through November 22, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 19, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Craig-Martin, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Craig-Martin will be on view from October 12 through November 10, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 19, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of new work by Matt Kleberg. This show marks his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Matt Kleberg will be on view from September 14 through October 13, 2023. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 14, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

Out of Time showcases a series of paintings conceived during the artist’s time as an Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome in the fall of 2021. Drawing inspiration from the architectural fragments, continuously eroding structures, shadows, colors, and floor mosaics at the Baths of Caracalla, Ogden’s new series, aptly titled Bathers, combines energizing color fields, tessellating shapes, and fluid movements to explore abstraction’s continuum between antiquity and the present day.

Elsa Hansen Oldham crafts whimsical textiles adorned with miniature hand-embroidered figures sourced from the realms of history, politics, mythology, and popular culture. Her fiber works span a diverse range of sizes, from delicate small-scale creations to grand quilts. These works combine traditional American needlework with a digitized aesthetic reminiscent of virtual game avatars. By merging the enduring tradition of cross-stitching with the computerized style of her characters, Hansen Oldham harnesses the expressive potential of embroidery as a medium for contemporary storytelling.

I am honored to present this exhibition, Her Voice, in honor of my late wife, Gretchen Berggruen. Co-owner of Berggruen Gallery, Gretchen was the heart and soul of the gallery. This group show features more than thirty artists, all of whom Gretchen championed, worked closely alongside, and deeply admired. This exhibition reflects Gretchen’s vision and her great passion in life. Those who had the pleasure to have known her know the deep level of care and attention with which she always acted. Her expertise, drive, kindness, patience, and perseverance drove the gallery to be what it is today. Gretchen was my partner and our leader, and I am proud to present Her Voice, celebrating her life and all that she built. – John Berggruen

Tom Otterness, an iconic American sculptor, is celebrated for his bronze figures that animate public spaces throughout the world. His career began in 1978, when he became a member of Collaborative Projects, a pioneering community of independent artists in New York City, and he has since focused much of his work on site-specific projects. Otterness’s public works are highly recognizable and widely appreciated, such as his popular 2004 multi figure sculptural installation Life Underground for New York Metropolitan Transportation at the 14th Street Union Square subway station. Otterness’s spirited creatures generate moments of pause in busy urban life, allowing each passersby experiences of levity and satire while going about their daily lives. Otterness employs the lost-wax process to create his cast metal figures, ranging from palm-sized to monumental. His characters relay witty commentary and discerning truths on social matters, human emotions, and fabled idioms. This exhibition presents a survey of Otterness’s sculptures from 1999 to 2022, including personified animals and humanoid figures, some of which simply serve to lighten the viewer’s mood with a smile, while others tackle themes of economic disparity and political injustice.

Tom McKinley’s new body of work binds evocative architectural paintings with peering commentary on civic engagement, surveillance, and cultural archetypes. McKinley’s hyper realistic paintings explore the relationships between objects, architecture, and the natural world. Through his imagined settings, McKinley studies the link between light and color and how interior spaces interact with landscape. The artist often begins his work with an architectural design.

Paul Wonner was a distinguished American painter who keenly explored the fluidity between abstraction and realism throughout his spanning career. This exhibition highlights his still-life paintings and brings together large-scale works from various private California collections. This assemblage of twenty paintings, dating between 1977 and 2000, distinctively marks a pivotal bend in Wonner’s career: the artist’s illustrious turn towards Abstract Realism and his acclaimed landscapes of objects.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Peter Saul: San Francisco, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by American artist Peter Saul. This show marks Saul’s first exhibition with the gallery. The presentation will be on view from January 13 through February 26, 2022.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Let’s Be Still, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders. This show marks Greenfield-Sanders’ sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Odili Donald Odita: Climate Change, an exhibition of recent paintings by Nigerian American artist Odili Donald Odita. This show marks Odita’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from October 14 through November 13, 2021.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Paul Kremer / UV, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American painter, Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from September 9 through October 9, 2021.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Austin Eddy: A Place For Dreams, an exhibition of recent paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Austin Eddy. This show marks Eddy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Austin Eddy explores the formal concerns of shape, light, color, and collage while embracing the complex and broad spectrum of human emotion in his semi-autobiographical paintings. The artist created this new body of work as stringent quarantine orders began to lift and the world drastically changed once more. The sentiments bound up in Eddy’s vivid paintings reflect this unfamiliar time…from solitude and anxiety to romance and harmony to tension and tragedy. Birds, which sprawl across each of the artist’s canvases, are the driving subject matter and motif for these conflicting sensations. Eddy presents his birds as a way to understand the strain engrossed in the human experience—whether we are caged, soaring through the sky, or something in between.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Lucy Williams: MOSAIC, an exhibition of recent mixed media bas-relief collages by British artist Lucy Williams. This show marks Williams’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view May 20 through July 3, 2021.

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1948-1992, a sweeping exhibition of the artist’s most evocative works from the height of his career.

Michael Gregory’s most recent body of work presents a series of new oil paintings that render the vast, captivating, and almost ineffable beauty of the American landscape—a subject matter that has always fascinated the artist. Gregory writes, “America has always been an idea, a construct of our imagination, and our imagination has outdistanced even its vast boundaries and empty places. The American West has provided us a rich metaphor for a discussion of our hopes, aspirations and failures. It is the subject of literature, poetry, and song—part of our American common language.” Gregory’s landscapes, rich in detail, continue to expand this great American metaphor.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Santa Monica based artist, Bruce Cohen.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Wayne Thiebaud to coincide with the artist's 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the gallery.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Alicia McCarthy. McCarthy is considered an integral member of the Mission School, a group of young San Francisco artists who were associated with the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and who worked in and around the Mission District in the early 1990s. Working at the intersection of craft/folk art and urban street and graffiti culture, this core group of artists cultivated an artistic practice that prized the handmade and the local in an increasingly technologized society.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present OBJECTively Speaking: Contemporary Sculpture, a powerful survey of forms that transcend notions of material, line, volume, and balance. We are also excited to announce the introduction of Berggruen Gallery 3D viewing experiences, a new feature that we are inaugurating with our current OBJECTively Speaking: Contemporary Sculpture exhibition. OBJECTively Speaking brings together distinct processes from a dynamic range of artists while simultaneously meditating on the Minimalist art movement. The artists present in this showing have all worked to both continue and disrupt notions of sculpture as we understand it, even having influenced one another’s work in real-time. While Joel Shapiro’s geometric abstractions speak to Donald Judd’s unadorned objects, Anish Kapoor’s exploration of reflectivity acknowledges Joseph Kosuth’s unique use of light and medium 45 years prior. Examining the influence of Minimalist, Installation, Abstract, and Conceptual sculpture in the 20th and 21st centuries, OBJECTively Speaking presents a complex yet complimentary selection of works.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Paintings, an extensive exploration of light, color, and composition through the medium of paint.From an exquisite example of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light series to the colorful environments of local, Bay Area painters Muzae Sesay and Jenny Sharaf, Contemporary Paintings abounds with saturated hues, graphic geometries, and varying techniques. Whether it be whimsical abstraction or meticulous realism, the paintings juxtapose one another to open dialogues regarding how artists render their surrounding world. The exhibition inaugurates the gallery’s reopening and summer programming, reflecting Berggruen Gallery's ongoing dedication to presenting exhibitions that bring together works from the contemporary canon and of historical significance. Furthermore, the show features a dynamic and diverse group of artists from several different countries, from the United States to South Korea to the United Kingdom.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Richard Serra: Works on Paper, an exhibition of works on paper and mylar, oil stick drawings, and etchings. Richard Serra says about his drawing “Drawing gives me an immediate return for my effort and the result is commensurate with my involvement. It is an activity that requires solitude, it is the most concentrated space in which I work.” Throughout his career, Serra has made drawings as separate, immediate, and fundamental lines of investigation to his sculptures. They are explorations in their own right, integral to the overall concerns of his sculptural practice, and unique intuitive explorations within their own established criteria. Using black paintstick or oilstick, heated to a viscous and sometimes fluid state, he creates elemental forms through direction action on the paper and the accretion of medium. Serra has also reinvigorated the traditional etching medium, using deeply bitten plates to create expressive gestural forms. "Tracks #2," 2007, paintstick on handmade paper, 41 7/8 x 41 7/8 inches.

John Alexander: Landscape and Memory is comprised of nine paintings and four drawings, work that comes together in reverence for the formal tradition of landscape painting. Paying homage to an Impressionist Master, Claude Monet, Alexander paints dreamy hollyhocks. Invoking the more recent Hudson River School, Alexander carefully creates bucolic scenes of both reality and idealization. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Alexander also nods to the Abstract Expressionists, applying thick strokes of paint in a gestural, emotional meditation. In turn, Alexander’s work pays tribute to the long and varied legacy of landscape painting before him while simultaneously remaining true to his own, very personal, connection to nature. Through the amalgamation of art historical context, environmental conservation, and the integration of a more intimate narrative, Alexander produces a body of work that is raw, compelling, and perhaps above all else, natural. Image: "Ibis and Wonderland," 2019,oil on canvas, 64 x 70 inches.

Spanning five decades of the artist’s career, the work comprising Mark di Suvero: Sculpture offers unique insight into the evolution of di Suvero’s artistic practice. Among the early works in the exhibition are Untitled (1975) and Mayakovsky (1976), both exquisite examples of di Suvero’s reconciliation between daring construction and expressive, organic forms. Advancing to the present day, di Suvero creates work he calls ‘puzzle pieces,’ – intricate structures composed of many different individual parts which have the ability to construct several different configurations within themselves. Most recently, the artist preserves the quintessential properties of his early works whilst demonstrating further complexity and play in additional mediums. Image: "Ibu," 1991, steel, 31 1/2 x 33 x 19 inches