FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jennifer Draughon
Andrea Schwartz Gallery
545 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
415.495.2090 – Phone
415.495.2094 – Fax
jennifer@asgallery.com
www.asgallery.com
 
Donald Bradford
Love & War
June 19 – July 26, 2013
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
 
Andrea Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition, Love & War, featuring new paintings by Donald Bradford opening Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Growing up around the family owned wedding chapel, Donald Bradford’s paintings reference his childhood memories of love and marriage. The home where he spent much of his childhood functioned as a full chapel, set just off the kitchen, complete with pews, an organ, and stained glass windows. The chapel was open 24 hours and couples waiting to get married often spilled over into the living and dining rooms of the house. Bradford’s paintings are influenced by the themes of love, weddings, and marriage that dominated the landscape of his early years. In his latest series, Bradford adds elements related to gay marriage and the controversial Proposition 8, which is soon to be decided by the Supreme Court. His paintings of bulletin boards and love letters blend images of “traditional marriage” with the iconography of social equality.
 
Born and raised in Yuma, Arizona, Donald Bradford now resides in the Bay Area. He received a BFA from University of Arizona, and a MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara. This is his first solo exhibition with Andrea Schwartz Gallery.
 
Andrea Schwartz Gallery was established in 1982 and is located in the South of Market district of San Francisco in our new gallery space located at 545 – 4th Street. ASG exhibits contemporary work of mid-career artists from the Bay Area and across the country. ASG is a member of SFADA. Gallery Hours are Monday - Friday 9 - 5, Saturday 1 – 5. The gallery will be closed 7/4. For further information and materials please contact Jennifer Draughon at 415-495-2090 or jennifer@asgallery.com. Additional information may also be found on our website, www.asgallery.com. Thank you!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
 
Fouladi Projects’ Maker Program is pleased to present two window installations by Esque Studio, featuring the glasswork of Justin Parker and Andi Kovel, in collaboration with Travis Harvey.
 
Opening reception: Saturday, June 22nd, 3 to 6pm
 
Powered by 15 years of experience collaborating within their medium, Portland, Oregon based Esque Studio has established itself as a master visionary in glass design. Owners Andi and Justin have skillfully merged their vast talents to create uniquely modern objects inspired by both nature and function. Playing with scale, traditional shapes and contemporary tastes, the two have succeeded in pushing the boundaries of how glass can be used, all the while celebrating the inherent elemental beauty and translucent light embracing qualities of their material.
 
For this exhibition, Esque has created a body of glass artwork referencing the concept of “Modern Heirlooms”. It is inspired by the notion that people desire to be in the company of nostalgic objects as they can then be reminded of a simpler, more comforting era. On view will be colorful organically shaped vases, birdhouses, hand sculpted figurines, and objet d’art.
 
About the Maker Program:
 
As a compliment to our stable of contemporary fine artists, the Maker Program aims to cultivate and further expand our ever-evolving community of artists, collectors and art enthusiasts. Ranging from wood furniture, ceramics, glass, and beyond, the functional art and design objects are all imaginatively conceived and exquisitely crafted. Alternating within our regular program of fine art exhibitions, Fouladi Projects will introduce new Makers throughout the year.

Our residency program has seen an amazing roster of artists come through this spring. Our next installment of “The Residents” will include work by Anastasia Kuba, Madeleine Campbell, Grant Rusk, Tim Sullivan, Peter Tonningsen & Lisa Levine, and Ana Vega.
 
The opening reception will be held Thursday, June 27 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Please join us to view this outstanding selection of new work.

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is honored to announce They Say I Came Back Americanized, an exhibition of new work by Gonzalo Fuenmayor. Born in Colombia but a resident of the United States since 1998, Fuenmayor’s remarkably precise charcoal drawings explore themes of cultural hybridity, identity politics, and acculturation.
 
As a Colombian artist living abroad, Fuenmayor once felt he had a responsibility to make art that commented on the social events happening back at home. Feeling too detached from the drugs and violence that he was expected to engage, Fuenmayor started drawing bananas instead. Bananas carry great cultural, historical, and economic significance in Colombia, and have even been tacitly embroiled in controversy if one considers the various Chiquita Brands International scandals. What initially began as a lighthearted attempt to self-exoticize and position himself as specifically “Colombian” has since evolved into an earnest exploration of cultural hybridity and transnational identity.
 
In his Apocalypse series, for instance, opulent Victorian and Rococo chandeliers grow out of bunches of bananas like absurd Dadaesque fruits. Their glowing lights and glimmering crystals are articulated using the negative space of the naked white paper while the bananas climb upward into the charcoal’s darkest values. The message is clear: the natural wealth of Latin America’s Banana Republics brought financial prosperity to its European colonizers. But despite allusions to a tragic and violent past, there is a harmony to the disjointed imagery that suggests not reconciliation but rather, according to Fuenmayor, “the subordination of the contradictory into a delicate and imaginative order” that figures as the present.
 
Recent works have provided the artist with the opportunity to interrogate the many latino stereotypes and caricatures that exist in American pop culture. In the Carmen series, for example, exaggerated, towering headdresses feature impossible columns of bananas, disco balls strung from palm trees, an effusion of flowers and ferns that suggest the wilds of the jungle, and a nesting family of flamingos. There is a mythical, supernatural quality about these headdresses that recalls both the magical realism of latino literature as well as the mystery of “the other.” They are also sexy, witty, and inescapably humorous.
 
Carmen Miranda—the Brazilian entertainer who purposefully sported a thick accent and knowingly performed the role of the exuberant latina—is the indisputable inspiration behind the Carmen series. What brought her success in the States, however, polarized her from her compatriots. Fuenmayor
explains that he too struggles to negotiate not only stereotypes of latinness, but as both a Colombian and American, he must also negotiate transnational identities. The Moment of Surrender is symbolic of Fuenmayor’s attempt to resolve his liminal circumstances as a foreigner both at home and abroad. In a nod to Oswalde de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928, a boa constructor, the proxy for one culture or experience, can be seen consuming the proxy of another: an ornate coat rack. The point is not to destroy the coat rack or to imitate it by becoming it, but to create something new. In this strange, startling act, hybridity is celebrated.
 
Gonzalo Fuenmayor was born in 1977 in Barranquilla, Colombia. He moved to New York City in 1998 to study at the School of Visual Arts, where he earned his BFA. In 2004 he earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fuenmayor has exhibited across North and South America, and has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellowships. This past spring, he traveled to the Amazon in the region of Leticia, Colombia on an Alumni Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. This will be his first solo exhibition at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

This body of work marks an important turning point for the San Francisco-based artist, who has been a figurative painter his entire life. Desiring the challenges and stimulation of a new aesthetic, Brown recently turned to abstraction as a way of breaking down illusory space into its essential elements. This dismantling and exploration of compound forms has been a slow, cautious project for Brown. Winterscape #1 and #2, for instance, feature imagery reminiscent of bare branches on a raw winter day. The primitive naturalism of these two intermediary paintings, however, ultimately gives way to bold, abstract gestures, while a black and white color palette is expanded to include bright, largely primary colors.
 
Brown creates a new gestural line in this body of work by applying paint with a brayer rather than a brush. The resulting markings—which are placed sparingly and deliberately—are relatively consistent in width, weight, and value. A type of hand roller, the brayer lends itself well to the creation of perfectly curvilinear forms, which Brown arranges to push energy out, funnel energy in, or pull energy down. This activity is augmented by shadowy echoes produced by a brayer spent of its paint, the canvases’ grand scale, and the paintings’ smooth, encaustic-like surfaces. The final compositions induce a kind of synesthetic effect, awakening waves of sound that parallel their elegant visual reverberations. It is no wonder Brown identifies Igor Stravinsky, composer of the animalistic and boldly avant-garde The Rite of Spring, as one of his artistic inspirations.
 
While Brown’s paintings—especially those in grayscale, such as June 28th #1 and Composition #1—are reminiscent of works by Richard Serra, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, Brown cites Marcel Proust’s The Remembrance of Thing Past as the oeuvre’s greatest inspiration. At seven volumes long, this groundbreaking literary achievement focuses not on action and plot, but on interiority and the relationship between experience and memory. Brown says, “I discovered what a monumental artistic achievement Proust had accomplished. He changed my world. All these paintings were painted while I listened to those unabridged audiobooks. I‘m currently in my fifth reading, and I’m getting to know it well. Proust’s work has been a constant reminder to be honest with myself and my work.”
 
In addition to Proust, Brown also identifies Caravaggio (see Composition #2 After Caravaggio), Henri Matisse (see Three Circles), and Francis Bacon as core influences. While his paintings indisputably build upon and answer to both abstract expressionism and minimalism, their sensuousness challenges the stark masculinity we come to expect for abstract expression while an affinity for experimentation subverts the control and premeditation that underlies minimalism. “It’s the accidents,” Brown says, “that keep feeding me more ideas.”
 
Charley Brown was born in 1945 in Barstow, California. He studied at California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA, and received both his BA and MA in Art from Humbolt State University. In addition to exhibiting in galleries across the United States and Europe, Brown has shown at the New Museum, New York City and has had murals commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute, the New Main Library of San Francisco, and Stanford University. This will be his first solo exhibition at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce “A Dialogue with Tradition,” an exhibition of new paintings by Guy Diehl, on view September 5–28, 2013. With this exhibition, Diehl continues to explore the innumerable dimensions and possibilities of the still life, his subject of inquiry for the last three decades. This long-term investigation has yielded a rich and nuanced range of results that have, in turn, culminated in a singular understanding of realism. It has also solidified his confidence in his own artistic intuition. Diehl explains that, unlike his younger self, he now trusts in the natural evolution of his practice and the tendency for one inspiration to precipitate another.
 
Books endure as important formal and compositional anchors across this work; their carefully articulated titles also give viewers more to see and reference while taking in a painting. Some marked changes, however, are also evident. Diehl has introduced more geometric forms—such as bottles, blocks, spheres, and boxes—and shifted the lighting to include more refractive light and dramatic highlighting. The colors have become more statured and jewel-like while the increased shadow-play has heightened the formal interaction between objects. The atmosphere too displays a newfound drama reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish still life painters.
 
Much like words, each object in Diehl’s paintings can be considered in relation to another object, whether a vessel, postcard, book, or talisman. Each combination is subsequently open to a myriad of interpretations, and Diehl is pleased when viewers draw connections or see meanings that he himself had not considered. As his work is first and foremost “art about art,” the lynchpin of his paintings is their references to other artworks. Modernism has been a recurring theme for him for many years and is celebrated again in Still Life with Robert Delaunay #2–1919-2013 (2013), which marks the centennial of Modernism and the 1913 Armory show in New York. A number of other paintings in the exhibition also reference important Modernist artists—such as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi, and Robert Delaunay—who each uniquely embody the revolutionary convergence of visual art, music, science, and psychology that erupted at the beginning of the 20th century. Diehl channels this confluence of events and ideas on a smaller scale through the networks of connections created within his paintings.
 
Instead of reproducing an artist’s most iconic work, Diehl tends to select lesser-known pieces just beyond the artist’s mainstream oeuvre. Such an approach fosters inquiry and engagement by exposing viewers to the unfamiliar and encouraging them to ask questions not only about the art presented, but also about the nature of art in general. In addition to more esoteric works, Diehl often features lesser-known artists as well. Still Life with Bill Traylor and Robert Johnson (2012), for example, places two underappreciated American artists into dialogue: Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues musician who revolutionized guitar-playing, and Bill Traylor, a former slave and self-taught artist who began painting in his mid-80s. Not only were both men artistic pioneers, they also lived extraordinary lives marked by struggle and racial discrimination.
 
Bill Traylor appears in a second painting featured in “A Dialogue with Tradition.” There is something very primitive and naïve, and yet impossibly intuitive and masterful about Traylor’s depiction of a dog that Diehl limns for Still Life with Bill Traylor (2012). This and other works radiate a joy and honesty that, for Diehl, moves them as close as one can get to approaching art as it’s meant to be. The choice of Traylor also produces an interesting relationship since the older artist’s simple naturalism, while not objective in and of itself, suddenly becomes so through Diehl’s realistic rendering. The implications and repercussions of this and other subtle, unexpected dynamics are precisely what Diehl wants his viewers to ponder.
 
Diehl was born in 1949 in Pittsburgh, PA. He earned his BA from California State University Hayward in 1973 and his MA from San Francisco State University in 1976. Diehl has exhibited extensively across the United States and at select international galleries, and was the 2005 recipient of Biennial Exhibition Award, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. This will be his second solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.