Anglim/Trimble

Seeing Male is an exhibition of photographs captured by partners Ken Graves and Eva Lipman which belong to individual projects shot over three decades. In the early years of their practice, Lipman and Graves documented traditionally male dominated sites: in the back rooms of sporting events, on the sidelines of demolition derbies, in European bathhouses, at military barracks and Boy Scout jamborees. Turning their cameras away from the main event, Lipman and Graves searched for a visual language to express hidden tensions, vulnerabilities and desires at the heart of individual subjects. Photographing during ill-fitted moments, misperformances, and unguarded excess, the artists expose the alienation, anxiety and oppression inflicted upon the male psyche. Despite the social conventions that heterosexualize male contact, homoerotic tensions erupt with latent eroticism, manifest in such qualities as sacrifice and devotion. The extremity of competition, the profound desire for cathartic release and the drive for containment all express the need to overcome restrictions imposed on the male body. Please join us for a reception on Saturday, March 9, from 4-6pm in our first floor gallery. Seeing Male is on view through April 27.

You Never Know presents four series of plein air paintings, created by Rico Solinas from 1990-2024, which document industrial environments and ungentrified holdouts in the margins of San Francisco. The pieces are linked by his immersion in the Bay Area physical and political landscape: he paints outside, under bright skies, in intimate contact with people and communities. By playing with canvas shape, alignment and arrangement, Solinas creates an oblique composition that questions conventional presentation. In the 1990s, naval bases around the Bay provided the warship material for US intervention in the ongoing Kosovo war. Solinas’s paintings of these vessels, shown in a checker board formation of off-kilter ships, invoke an emotional seasickness towards the US military-industrial complex.   The tondi (Italian for circular paintings) were painted in reverse, using mirrors attached to his easel, and reflect the topsy turvy, unorthodox nature of the Bay Area. Resembling the convex safety mirrors found in parking garages, these portals of optical curiosity offer a new way of looking.   His handsaw paintings depict the exteriors of art museums in the Bay Area, New York and Italy, a network seldom seen in a single space. Their surreal rendering on handsaw blades underlines the power and impact of these institutions on artistic communities.   Solinas’s small gouaches, his most recent project, were created in the streets of the Bayview district of San Francisco over the course of four years during the COVID-19 pandemic. These paintings document a community that has historically been overlooked, and as such evolved an attitude which accepts the uncertainty of life, where one’s best made plans often turn out differently. In life just as in art: you never know. You Never Know is on view through Saturday, April 27.

Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present In a grove, a gathering of artists utilizing abstraction to create rapturous states of vision marked by the qualities of the sensorial and perceptual. Curated by Dean Smith, the exhibition includes work by Thomas Akawie, Brad Brown, Mason Dowling, Donald Feasél, Renée Gertler, Robin McDonnell, and Nancy White. Inspired by the titular poem of San Francisco visionary poet Philip Lamantia, In a grove expresses the elusive and terrifyingly ecstatic nature of our attempt to decipher the language of the godhead--whose unknowable aspects lie beyond actions or emanations. The paintings and sculptures address the exploration of spaces that create a demarcation between the body and the outside/other, between the self and non-self, or something greater than the self, and sites that vacillate between the agrestic and the architectonic. The artists ask us to consider wonderment and enigma as strategies for exploring what it means to reach outside the self and its environment into something far greater. They too ask what the possibilities of deciphering the talk of the gods may ultimately reveal. Please join us for a reception on Saturday, January 13 from 4-6 pm in our first-floor gallery at Minnesota Street Project. In a grove will be on view through Saturday, February 24. Pictured: Donald Feasél, "Ashden," Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 60 in., 2022

We are pleased to announce our first exhibition of 2024, Bryan Keith Thomas: Tufted Cotton. Tufted Cotton is an immersive exhibition that explores the nuance of an ancestral portal through global tapestries and the engagement of black as a color, community, and consciousness. The works, including sculpture, painting, installation, and gallery interventions, celebrate spirituality and the Black experience through the historic symbols of cotton, roses, Church fans, Holy Bibles, text, and the African and African American image. He includes nuances of Asia, India, and Africa as a single community. The mirrors, inspired by the Minkisi-Power figures and nail fetishes from central Africa, symbolize desire, mortality, and ancestral protection. The nails hold the energy of a prayer request. The small cloth bags (Heirloom Bags) adorning many of the paintings bear the spiritual and physical memories of the ancestors. In addition, the bags contain seeds, money, crystals, hair, prayer cloths, and more. Please join us for a reception on Saturday, January 6 from 4-6 pm in our second-floor gallery at Minnesota Street Project. Tufted Cotton is on view through Saturday, February 24. Bryan Keith Thomas was born in Dyersburg, TN and received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Thomas currently resides in Oakland, CA, where he works as a Professor of Fine Art within the Painting and Drawing and Critical Ethnic Studies departments at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Thomas has exhibited nationally, internationally, and within the Bay Area including Art Basel, Miami; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Gallery Guichard, Chicago, IL; ArtJaz Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; E & S Gallery, Louisville, KY; the American Embassy, Dakar, Senegal, and Du Sable Museum, Chicago, IL, among others. Thomas received the "White House Honor" as First Lady Laura Bush's guest for his work within the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC, and his paintings are in several private and public collections worldwide. Pictured: Bryan Keith Thomas, "Forever Free," Victorian mourning pins, Tennessee cotton, heirloom bags, antique silk tassel, paper flower, rolling pin, antique hand fan, mother of pearl, acrylic and oil on wood, 21 x 33 x 4 in., 2022

Prêt à Placer, or “ready to place” in French, is a gallery artist group exhibition that includes friends from SFArtsEd. The works are small but relay the depth and breadth of ideas and styles present in the Bay Area. In addition,10% of all sales benefit SFArtsEd.

Biology of Flight presents paintings and collages that layer memory and meaning. As color, shape, and pattern combine on the picture plane, stories from childhood, fables, and the artist’s delight and concern for Nature appear.

Animals’ Reading Room includes videos and paintings that question the moment when humanity took a wrong turn in the evolution towards climate change. Anno looks at animals’ domesticity and the human impulse to exoticize, reflecting on beauty, knowledge, and culpability. The career monograph, Rebel Splendor, will also be available.

A. Frick Vernon: Narratives features drawings circa 1980 and 90, including some earlier works. Frick Vernon showcases the recurring thematic of the Tall Bold Woman, alongside references from Western and Eastern thought. With active line work and Pop colors, she encapsulates the frenetic freedom that was present in Northern California.

Abstraction features gallery artists who work with abstraction and use repetition, pattern, and accumulation as formal and conceptual devices. Also included in the show are a selection of works from the estate of Paule Anglim. Artists John Beech, Leo Bersamina, Mark Brest van Kempen, David Ireland, Jack Jefferson, Paul Kos, Tom Marioni, Tomas Nakada, Milton Resnick, Katherine Sherwood, Carlos Villa, Stephen Vincent, Benji Whalen, and Hannah Wilke.

Sentient Terrains presents new ceramic projects, assemblages, and related site studies that investigate metabolism, climate, transmutation, and correlations between living and non-living systems. Throughout the gallery, sculptures, photographic imagery, and flags are in conversation about ecology in an expanded frame, complemented by proposals, video, and diagrammatic expressions. Artist Talk and Walk-through Saturday, June 17 at 3pm