Greg Kucera Gallery

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our first exhibition, Supreme Fresh, by Long Beach, CA based, Oaxacan artist, Narsiso Martinez. Drawn from his own experiences as a farmworker, Martinez creates drawings, prints and mixed media installations that pay homage to the people behind the scenes in the agricultural economy who toil in the fields picking the produce we consume. His subjects are depicted in the gear they wear to perform this necessary, but dangerous, job. Hats and goggles are worn to shield them from the sun. Masks and bandanas cover their mouths and noses to protect them from pesticides. Martinez creates his images in ink, gouache, and charcoal, directly on discarded produce boxes. Integrating the boxes’ graphics into the composition, the artist gives context to the portraits, contrasting the disparities of socioeconomic lifestyles between that of the farmworkers and agribusiness owners. Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in 2009 from Los Angeles City College, his Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach in 2012, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach in 2018. His work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of new works by Northwest artist, Joey Veltkamp. The show’s title, “Tell Your Cat I Said PsPsPs,” is a popular meme about getting the attention of a disinterested cat. During the pandemic, the artist and Ben, his husband, discovered they had no problem attracting felines to their Bremerton home, having no cats at the start and letting five cats into their household in just 6-months. Before the arrival of felines, Veltkamp’s house was usually full of fresh-cut garden flowers which they had spent the past few years planting. Unfortunately, many of their favorites (lilies, tulips, peonies) are toxic to cats. Now their home is mostly devoid of indoor flowers. As a result, the artist began making floral arrangements out of fabric. The quilts, or “soft paintings,” in this exhibition are filtered through the lens of the artist’s daily life. The subjects mostly being traditional paired-down still-lifes of flower arrangements and images of cats, allowing the beauty of the flowers to remain while documenting the joy that this abundance of cats have brought to their household. Joey Veltkamp has shown work in exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and the Frye art Museum. The artist had his first one-person museum exhibition, SPIRIT!, at Bellevue Arts Museum in 2022-23. His work is in the collections of Seattle Art Museum and King County Public Art Collection. He currently lives and works in Bremerton, WA.

The exhibition, titled The Space Between Things, is the artist's continued exploration of visual detail through imagined still-lifes, studio views, and landscape vistas. Working primarily from memory rather than direct observation, Lundin's paintings incorporate everyday objects and settings to create seemingly casual, but in actuality quite formal, compositions.

Wicklander is a craftsman of diverse talents. His work involves many different techniques including wood carving, blown and cast glass, metal-smithing and welding, bronze casting, and an intriguing combination of materials. Wicklander sees his forte as his "ability to use very different materials to their greatest advantage."

The title, Extended Warranty, is a sarcastic jab by the artist at a world he continues to explore, celebrate, and criticize. An extended warranty is often sold as a purported necessary protection against disaster. But in reality only certain things, things that will never need repair or replacement, are covered. It is something we will pay for that we will likely never use. If we do end up using it, it is never as good as we hoped.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our fifteenth one-person exhibition of work by New York artist Darren Waterston since 1993. This exhibition, titled Last Time I Saw You, is the artist’s personal and intimate reflection on loss, dream states, and the desire to articulate the unknowable or unseeable. The otherworldly and atmospheric compositions of Waterston’s paintings have references to celestial bodies, spectral apparitions, water and air, light and shadow, and the act of flight. “More personal in nature, these paintings record my own navigation through the loss of a friend and the poetic pathos and even joy, that can come out of contemplations of impermanence.” – Darren Waterston Biography Darren Waterston (born 1965, Fresno, CA) graduated with a BFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1988, after studying at the Akademie der Künste and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of the British Library, London, England; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; The Broad Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA; UCLA Hammer Museum, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Boise Art Museum, ID; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Stanford University Library, Stanford, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; New York Public Library, New York City, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Washington State University, WA; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; and Seattle Art Museum, WA. He lives and works in Hudson, NY.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our eleventh one-person exhibition of work by Seattle artist Ross Palmer Beecher. While not a Folk artist, Beecher is endlessly fascinated by the many forms it can take, the contexts surrounding its production, and the complete devotion to a given craft that Folk and self-taught artists bring to their work. Using a variety of primarily recycled materials the artist f i l ter s these t radi t ions in making her contemporary objects. She embraces her New England roots while her observations of the world we live in today are revealed through a wide variety of political and personal themes executed in her own particular brand of Yankee ingenuity. The artist’s quilts and sculptures are made of tin cans, uniforms, aluminum pop cans, assorted metal containers, and musical instruments. Using well-known American designs for quilting, Beecher uses the printed information on metal in the same way that traditional quilters use patterned fabrics. The pieces are cut out with tin snips, stitched together with wire and hand cut staples, and combined with other found objects. “Drawing, painting, and block printing have always been part of my tool box but it is my metal quilts that push me beyond my edge to a place of new possibilities and the hope of innovation. My bridge moment into making metal quilts happened when I moved to the west coast. I saw a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe framed in metal AA battery casings. Connecting readily available free recycled material and the environmental benefit of reusing it in my art, made my heart pound.” – Ross Palmer Beecher

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our third one-person exhibition of work by Northwest artist Juventino Aranda. The multimedia artist explores issues of identity, social justice and the marginalization of cultures in today’s United States. Aranda’s search for self-identity informs his process as it relates to Pre-Columbian Mexico and the social, political, and economic struggles of this late capitalistic American society. Using a variety of materials and techniques the artist makes work that appropriates images and phrases from his childhood and family history. Paintings, several on Pendleton blankets, comment on the artist and his cultural identity. “I am Mexican and second generation “American”. My work demarcates the intersection of my Mexican and American identities. I am not Hispanic, Latino, and definitely not Spanish —even though I live everyday with the consequences of their conquest. My art struggles with feeling foreign in my native land. Not unlike my personal experiences of never fully ascribing to one cultural category, my artwork also blends and manipulates the categories of painting and sculpture, craft and high art, manufacturing and handmade work to develop a new visual lexicon that reflects the contemporary conditions of my experiences. My processes and material choices are embedded in the experiences of marginalized communities.” – Juventino Aranda “By using textiles as the canvas and embroidery as the paint, I am mirroring my attempt to uncover and celebrate those cultures and communities who are the foundation of a society but are often covered up or whitewashed by mainstream narratives. My wall-works are simultaneously paintings and sculptures. They include and combine paint, urethane resin, oil sticks, bronze, mirror, birch panel and corrugated cardboard. This media mixing is both high and low, native and foreign, other and accepted.” – Juventino Aranda

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our fourth exhibition by Seattle artist, Dan Webb. The exhibition, Burn, explores the destructive yet cleansing quality of fire. In Webb’s sculptures, nature and humankind are scorched by flame yet manage to survive, even thrive, in the charred remains. “When I say the word Burn out loud, my mind skitters over environmental disasters, endless forest fires, climate change, and the precarious state of the planet. But it only starts there. I also hear myself extending the word into a simple phrase — burn it down — which starts up yet another cascade of associations relating to governments, hierarchies, and cultural institution resistant to change. The idea that creative destruction is not only a physical force, deeply embedded in nature, but a cultural force, deeply embedded in the human psyche, is an interesting one. Nature has evolution, and we have revolution. Nature reinvents itself endlessly. We war with each other, and then drift back towards an oligarchic version of patriarchy. But maybe there is a new way of burning it down. A human hand, with its opposable thumb, has long been an avatar for humanity in much of my work, while the flower has long operated as a stand-in for nature. By making the leaves of the flowers start to reference human hands, the two began to overlap. The things that they do, either separately or together, seem logical enough, but the relationship is unclear, and the power dynamic undecided.” – Dan Webb

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh exhibition by Seattle artist Whiting Tennis. The title, Provincetown Drawings, refers to a September 2021 artist residency at Provincetown Tennis Club, home of the DNA Residency Studios, in Provincetown, MA.

The artist draws from a long-standing personal tradition of making and sending cards, from birthday and holiday cards to invitations and thank-yous. Livingston realized these bits of personal correspondence– sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate– has always been a place where she could experiment with new images and media.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our seventh exhibition by Portland artist Lynne Woods Turner. While the exhibition is evenly distributed between pencil on paper and oil painting, the show primarily focuses on drawing. Whether it be a painted line, a graphite line, a scratched line etched into oil paint, or simply an emphasized edge, drawing is the foundation of the work.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our third one-person exhibition of work by Las Vegas painter, Tim Bavington. In tribute to Bavington’s late friend and mentor, Dave Hickey, the exhibition’s title, The End Has No End (for Dave Hickey), comes from a song of the same name by New York rock band, The Strokes. The artist associates the title with one of Hickey’s favorite koans: “The branch from which the blossom hangs is neither long nor short.”

After our premier exhibition of David Byrd's work in 2013, much has progressed for his enduring legacy. Though he died a month after our show closed, we partnered with his estate to introduce his work in New York City at the 2014 ADAA art fair. His friend, Jody Isaacson, has expanded his career from there.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh solo exhibition of work by artist Jody Isaacson. In 1984 the Seattle native showed traditional wood block prints with Northwest imagery. Then, as now, her hand chiseled wood blocks– the matrix for her prints– are treated as art pieces. Her 1989 show featured an installation including two 14 x 20 foot wood block prints focusing on patterns drawn from cedar forests and wood grain patterns.

The editions in this exhibition were created utilizing a variety of printing techniques lithography, intaglio, relief, woodcut, screen and pigment print. Materials as diverse as cardboard, mylar, plastic, metallic foil and tape are deployed in delicate and deeply emotional compositions.

A “second-generation” member of the Northwest School, Richard Gilkey was known for his rugged, straightforward approach to painting the lush landscape of the Skagit Valley. Skunk cabbage, marshes, snaking rivers and night skies were depicted with muscular strokes of paint applied with pallet knives as well as brushes.

BLUE PEARL, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over wood panel 48 x 33.75 inches

FOUR CROSSED INVERTING FIELDS #2, 2019 Watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works on paper by Jacob Lawrence. Among the 20th century’s most important artists, Lawrence documented the African-American experience and the life of the working man. We will feature many prints from two major suites and also several individual well-known prints for sale.
 Also included will be several drawings and paintings from Lawrence’s career. One painting depicts the “Celebration of Heritage” of the Native American communities. Another illustrates a family wondering over its newest addition, a small baby. We will have several drawings from the Vesalius Series, illustrating the musculature of the human body in motion. A watercolor shows a track meet while a colored pencil drawing and an ink drawing shows carpenters in motion, both from the “Builders Series.” “The Legend of John Brown” details the life of the American abolitionist who organized a movement to arm slaves and overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. “The Life of Toussaint l’Ouverture” tells the story of the Haitian general and charismatic leader of the Haitian Revolution, an insurrection by self-liberated slaves in the French colony or Saint-Domingue. Both suites depict the buildup and aftermath of battles waged to end slavery.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of prints by New York artist Anders Bergstrom. With this exhibition, Bergstrom continues his exploration of the common brown paper bag. Each jagged edge, creased fold, and greasy stain is an homage to this everyday object that we usually take for granted. But there is now a more playful, less reality-based result, allowing the final work to be more colorful, painterly, and thought-provoking.