Hollis Taggart

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Where Color Begins: Works on Paper by Sam Francis, a focused exhibition of 13 gouache and watercolor paintings by the influential postwar abstractionist. On view in the gallery’s first floor Annex space, the exhibition presents a curated group of works that reflect Francis’s deep engagement with color, gesture, and light. These works on paper—fluid, immediate, and often experimental—embody the distinctive vitality he discovered in the medium. Where Color Begins explores how Francis embraced paper not merely as a support, but as a dynamic field where ideas could unfold with spontaneity. It became a space for testing the limits of chromatic energy, where intuitive movement met deliberate attention to negative space, and where process itself often emerged as the point. Born in San Mateo, California, in 1923, Francis came to painting through unlikely circumstances. After a serious spinal injury in his early twenties, he spent several years in recovery, much of it bedridden. It was during this period that he began painting, studying with Bay Area artist David Park. Park’s emphasis on intuitive, gestural mark-making left a lasting imprint. “Painting,” Francis later reflected, “was my way back to life.” Once recovered, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually leaving behind his medical studies to fully commit to art. In 1950, Sam Francis moved to Paris, just as New York was becoming the epicenter of the art world. Rather than follow the gravitational pull of the New York School, he charted an independent path, immersing himself in the legacy of French modernism—particularly the work of Matisse, Bonnard, and Monet, whose use of color, light, and spatial openness deeply informed his sensibility. Though he maintained a physical and philosophical distance from New York, Francis remained central to the discourse of Abstract Expressionism, with his early inclusion in MoMA’s landmark Twelve Americans exhibition (1956) and relationships with key New York dealers like Martha Jackson and André Emmerich. Over the decades, Francis’s practice unfolded across studios in Paris, Tokyo, Bern, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica, where he developed a luminous, improvisational style that infused Abstract Expressionism with a distinctly cross-cultural perspective. His works on paper—widely regarded as among the most exceptional in his celebrated oeuvre—embody the global reach of his vision and his role as a vital link between American abstraction and international modernism. The works in this exhibition, created between the 1960s and 1990s, distill many of the essential elements of Francis’s visual vocabulary. Swirls of pigment, cascading drips, and radiant washes hover around blank or lightly stained voids—or coalesce into dense, atmospheric fields. The oscillation between negative space and chromatic saturation reveals Francis’s enduring preoccupation: where emptiness ends, and where color begins. These works pulse with motion, tension, and breath—what art historian Peter Selz once described as Francis’s signature sense of “suspension and levitation,” a marked contrast to the grounded intensity of Abstract Expressionism. Francis held a particular affinity for working on paper, once noting, “Paper is much more beautiful than canvas… I like the way the paint flows into the fiber.” His works on paper were not side projects or studies, but complete, self-contained compositions. The format enabled a kind of immediacy and risk-taking that was essential to his process. Many of his most inventive explorations of color and form took shape here, in works that feel at once deliberate and open to chance.

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo show of work by the Japanese American artist Ralph Iwamoto since taking on representation of his estate in 2023. Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations will explore the artist’s geometric works from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, focusing specifically on Iwamoto’s meticulous study of the octagon, a form which preoccupied him for nearly a quarter of a century. Repetitively reworking the same shape for over two decades, the exhibition showcases Iwamoto’s remarkable ability to find seemingly endless possibilities within a singular form, demonstrating a boundless creativity spurred by geometric constraint. Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations follows the exhibition Wild Growth: Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955 at Hollis Taggart in March 2023, which focused on a very different body of work from the very beginning of Iwamoto’s oeuvre, when he explored the flora and fauna of his native Hawaii. Ralph Iwamoto: Octagonal Permutations will be on view from June 5 through July 18, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 5, from 6-8PM.

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present When We Meet Again: RISD MFA Painting Class of 2025, a thesis show highlighting ten artists to celebrate their milestone of graduating from the Painting MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Artists include Cassidy Argo, Jenny Chen, Mary Connell, Shamira Dharap, Noa Ironic, David Legrand, Xuân-Lam Nguyen, Abigail Parsons, Carrie Wilmarth, and Tim Zhang. The exhibition will be on view at Hollis Taggart from June 5 through July 18, with a reception on Thursday, June 12, from 6 to 8pm.