Larry Bell has been breaking boundaries in the art world since the early 1960s, making history in the Light and Space movement of Southern California. Our curator Michelle Bello proudly presents Unbounded, a collection of recent works by Bell and three other dynamic California artists: Joey Piziali, Judith Foosaner, and Casper Brindle. Each artist distinctively explores boundaries in their art now on view at Sloan Miyasato in San Francisco.

Throughout his career Larry Bell has made investigations into the properties of light on surface. By experimenting with the nature of surface and its relationship to space, Bell has devised a methodology characterized by spontaneity, intuition, and improvisation. His experiments are primarily concerned with technically advanced material and their potential to challenge and extend the thresholds of perception.

Made from papers, Mylar, and laminated film, his recent collages are seemingly smooth swathes of luminous colors that appear to change from different angles. “Sheets of these materials have been coated with vaporized metals and quartz in a thermal vacuum chamber,” says Bell. “Heat is then applied to the metals. The metals melt, and then gas or vaporize. As this is taking place in a vacuum, there is no resistance to the vaporized metals spreading throughout the chamber and coating the materials. Metals have a crystalline structure as solids. When they gas, and then coat the surface of a material, they retain the same crystalline structure. Crystals and light create rainbows, or light interference colors.”

Larry Bell
SF 1.30 12A, 2012
Mixed Media on Black Arches Paper
30 x 22 Inches

Larry Bell in the studio

Larry Bell was born in Chicago in 1939. Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Bell attended Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles from 1957 through 1959 where he was a student of Robert Irwin. He was extraordinarily successful as a young artist and showed regularly at Pace Gallery in New York. Bell’s work was also included in the seminal Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Responsive Eye in 1965. His art is in public collections throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Tate Gallery in London.

Joey Piziali
The Difference Between You and Me, 2008
Acrylic, Ink, and Latex on Canvas
60 x 72 Inches

“This series was influenced by my ongoing appreciation of contemporary architecture,” says artist Joey Piziali. “At the time I was looking at buildings by Rem Koolhaus, like the Seattle Central Library and studies of the CCTV towers in Beijing as well as Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower in New York. I loved the way the buildings performed as massive sculpture, they transform the space around them, engaging unexpected aspects of the urban environment. They create such unique and challenging compositions. They make me rethink what is possible.”

“In a painting I often think about subverting the expectation of a composition,” adds Piziali. “In the painting The Difference Between You And Me, I wanted to present a painting that fully established itself within an expected form, the architecture of the pictorial plane. The painting, composed of a geometric abstract work is floating in a frame of white space. The slashing sprayed lines activate the frame of the image. This gesture disrupts or defaces the image, pushing it to the background while simultaneously becoming a part of painting and engaging the white space. These lines push the composition to the edge of the frame. It’s as if they continue well beyond the painting/object itself.”

Judith Foosaner
Egyptian Chapter 12, 2014
Collage with Acrylic on Canvas
40 x 80 Inches

“All of my work derives from the ancients,” says artist Judith Foosaner. “The Egyptian Chapter series is the result of an investigation of organic forms, broken and reassembled into geometric units. Each unit combines with the next to express simultaneously, both continuity and interruption. I love the sinuous shapes in combination with the staccato supplied by the geometry. I love the suggestion of what is implicit. Once launched on these pieces, it became clear that their rhythms and the “stacked space” in which they were aligned was suggestive of so much of what I’d experienced with Egyptian hieroglyphs. The visual beauty of this early language never fails to call–this work of mine is its reply.”

Casper Brindle
Tange, 2014
Acrylic, Automotive Paint, and Resin on Panel
44 x 96 Inches

The paintings of Casper Brindle look as sleek as surfboards and shiny as high beams. Using color-shifting automotive paints and coats of glossy resin, this contemporary Los Angeles artist’s work stems from the Light and Space and Finish Fetish art movements of the 1960s, reflecting the car and surf culture of Southern California. Brindle was mentored by the internationally acclaimed artist Eric Orr, one of the pioneers of the Light and Space movement. Though Brindle’s work cannot be separated from the movement’s practice, it does stand out with its sophisticated studies of atmosphere and vaporous ambiguities that intrigue and compel us to navigate the hazy borders of perception. Subtle horizon lines aide this navigation. His richly hued canvases, composed of bands of softened colors, seem to radiate and extend far beyond the boundaries of the picture plane. Having spent a considerable amount of time on a surfboard, his work also reflects his personal passion for the ocean and skies of California.

Pricing
Tommy Talbot
(415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com

Sloan Miyasato
2 Henry Adams Street, Suite 212
San Francisco, CA 94103

Hours
Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm

Curator
Michelle Bello Fine Art Consulting
(415) 317-5975 info@michellebello.com

Follow
News   Facebook   Twitter
Instagram   Google+   Pinterest

sloanmiyasatofineart.com
 

Collect art from the comfort of your own backyard this summer. Our curator Michelle Bello has done your homework for you. Enjoy everything from a sizzling hot print by art world superstar Tauba Auerbach to a waggish cool blue bulldog sculpture by archetypal Bay Area artist Bob Hudson to Penny Olson’s sophisticated plaid photographs generated from nature walks in Berkeley’s Wildcat Canyon.

Visit Sloan Miyasato in San Francisco and online here.

Inquiries:
Tommy Talbot (415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com
2 Henry Adams Street, San Francisco, M-F, 9am-5pm

Judith Foosaner
Aerial Excursion, 2005
Oil on Canvas
60 x 60 Inches

With her emphasis on drawing and its place in the shifting fortunes of painting, Judith Foosaner intensely and relentlessly probes the possibilities of line. Gravity and flight, speed and resistance, weight, pressure, and direction are all present. Dance, music, and literature inform her art. “Certainly my work is greatly influenced by calligraphy–primarily Chinese and Japanese. I don’t know if it’s a correct definition, but my idea of calligraphy is a marriage of line and space. There is rhythm. There is movement. If there is a pause, it is pregnant. Expectant. Each mark calls space into being.”

Emily Lazarre
Night Run, 2014
Collage, Oil Paint on Paper
36.5 x 64.5 Inches (Framed Size)

Emily Lazarre cannot remember a time when her mind was not filled with images. The quality of light in a room, the shape of an object in her hands, the color of a linoleum floor, the horizon line delicately separating ocean from sky, a beach in fog. Color is woven into her memory. Blue collides with blue. Darks are pricked with the barest bits of bright green or yellow. As she works, a reverie of drifting remembrances encourages the harmony and dissonance of relative shapes and colors. Breaching the customary confines of the rectangle, images come to life again in her large-scale painted paper collages.

Penny Olson
Wildcat 204, 2013
Dye-Infused Aluminum
33 x 33 Inches

Penny Olson
Wildcat 200-9-12.3, 2013
Dye-Infused Aluminum
33 x 33 Inches

Penny Olson’s photography based work is an integrated synthesis of the artist’s diverse interests and expertise; digital technology, nature, textiles, reductive aesthetics, and process-driven art. She samples, extrudes, and overlays pixels from her more traditional photographs of plants and landscapes to create striated color fields of emanating light. The original source from nature is unrecognizable but it is suggested through the resulting color palette, luminosity, and the artwork’s title. As is typical for this ever-experimenting artist, Olson uses the latest in digital technology to create her most recent work. For the Wildcat Series she took photographs with an iPad while on walks through Berkeley’s Wildcat Canyon and used these images as the basis for her digital compositions.

Robert Hudson
Blue Dog, 2014
Cast Iron Dog, Shards of Cast Iron with Porcelain Enamel, Steel, Stainless Steel, Epoxy Paint
27 x 26 x 14 Inches

An archetypal Bay Area artist, Robert Hudson has been a primary force in the West Coast Assemblage and Funk Art movements, and is well known for his polychrome steel sculpture. Hudson’s works are characterized by a riotously visual approach as he carefully juxtaposes fabricated and found objects into pieces that burst with his signature wit. The careful geometry of his forms is often painted over in trompe l’oeil designs and decorative patterns as he skillfully manipulates the viewer’s perceptual experiences. Although his sculptures seem to have been thrown together haphazardly, there is so much method to Hudson’s madness that the viewer comes to understand that the method is the madness, a compulsion toward making mundane objects into art while leaving them anchored in the everyday.

Jeff Long
Harlequin, 2015
Mixed Media on Canvas
48 x 68.5 Inches

Elements of Modernist design fuse with motifs of tribal art in Jeff Long’s paintings. If the history of art, in a broad sense, has much to do with codifying our experience of the natural world, Long finds visual parallels among many cultures and in various time frames. Through artists like Matisse and his many artistic descendents, the visual vocabulary of pattern-making, flattened color and hard edges crossed over into mainstream Western art in the 20th Century from societies in which the abstraction of nature was traditional. Long has created a body of work characterized by the distillation of landscape and votive traditions from various cultures. His art expresses humanity’s impulse to connect the optical sense with a feeling for the wholeness of the world.

Tim Rice
Flow 24, 2015
Oil on Canvas
54 x 58 Inches

Nature is omnipresent in Tim Rice’s intuitive and organic abstractions. Using layer upon layer of oil paint in thin washes results in deep, indefinite, and luminous spaces. His paintings have the quality of filtered sunlight, dappled forest shade, and reflections in a slightly disturbed pond’s surface. “I come to an empty canvas in a spirit of adventure without a specific idea or image in mind. My process is improvisational. My only goal is that the ‘found’ image–through its mood, tension, movement or light–creates its own world and inhabits a palpable space. I remain intuitive rather than mindful in this activity.”

Tauba Auerbach
Mesh Moire I, 2012
Color Softground Etching
40.25 x 30 Inches
Edition of 40

Born and raised in San Francisco, Tauba Auerbach is one of the most important artists working in the contemporary art world. Her work is constantly shifting between conceptual art, abstraction, and graphic art. In her recent Mesh Moire etchings, in order to create the nearly pixelated visual interference of two grids slightly out of alignment–which calls to mind a digital photograph taken through a window screen or snapshots of a computer monitor–the artist pressed an elastic mesh directly onto a soft ground, distorting its pattern as it went through the press. As she printed the resulting plates on top of one another in complementary colors (choosing two plates out of a possible seven), the images inevitably aligned slightly differently in each of the prints. Combined, each of the original plates loses its identity as it blends with the other. As the different colored layers overlap and break away from one another, the surface of the print is given a nearly quivering, iridescent quality, a sum more compelling than either of its parts.

Judith Foosaner
Blackbird Sings, 2008
Oil on Canvas
78 x 26 Inches

Pricing
Tommy Talbot
(415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com

Sloan Miyasato
2 Henry Adams Street, Suite 212
San Francisco, CA 94103

Hours
Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm

Curator
Michelle Bello Fine Art Consulting
(415) 317-5975 info@michellebello.com

Follow
News   Facebook   Twitter
Instagram   Google+   Pinterest

sloanmiyasatofineart.com
 

Lydia Panas
Papayas, 2010
Digital C-Print
30 x 30 Inches, Edition of 5
19 x 19 Inches, Edition of 10

Sloan Miyasato Fine Art presents photographs by Lydia Panas, curated by Michelle Bello. Panas says this about these works: “I am interested in the facades people present to hide things about themselves. I look for the smallest details to understand what might lie underneath. My pictures are not so much portraits of the models, as a view of interior life. In this series of portraits I constructed a system where food becomes a barrier, symbolic of the obstacles we create to disguise our intimate feelings. It is not the models’ faces that suggest the emotion, but the way the food is presented. Together the portraits in this series present a feast: fruit, pasta, meat, vegetables. We are not sure whether they provide nourishment or taunt us with the gifts.”

Panas’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The recipient of a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship, her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brooklyn Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

Lydia Panas
Digital C-Prints, 2010
Each 30 x 30 Inches, Edition of 5
Each 19 x 19 Inches, Edition of 10

Pricing
Tommy Talbot
(415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com

Sloan Miyasato
2 Henry Adams Street, Suite 212
San Francisco, CA 94103

Hours
Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm

Curator
Michelle Bello Fine Art Consulting
(415) 317-5975 info@michellebello.com

Follow
News   Facebook   Twitter
Instagram   Google+   Pinterest

sloanmiyasatofineart.com

Jimi Gleason
Melt Fracture, 2014
Silver Deposit, Acrylic on Canvas
40 x 40 Inches

At Sloan Miyasato Fine Art, curated by Michelle Bello, artist Jimi Gleason seduces viewers with his latest body of work The Diamond Paintings. Utilizing non-traditional techniques and the luminescent use of silver deposit, they allow us to reflect on the mechanics of perception. The surfaces of these paintings have been purposely overexposed to his chemical electroplating process and as a result are corroded. Some parts may appear smoother than others but all have been chemically altered to some degree, providing a push-pull effect. His elegant diamond shapes beckon while his uneven surfaces keep us at bay.

Born in Newport Beach, California, Gleason received his BA from UC Berkeley and studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York City where he worked as a photo assistant and technician. Returning to California, he was employed in the studio of noted abstract painter Ed Moses for five years. His paintings are held in public and private collections around the world. Gleason’s works have been exhibited in conjunction with significant institutions including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Armand Hammer Museum, and Seattle Art Museum.

Jimi Gleason: Silvering, 2014
Film by Eric Minh Swenson
4:52 Minutes

Jimi Gleason
Silver Halide Mix, 2014
Silver Deposit, Acrylic on Canvas
66 x 54 Inches

Jimi Gleason
Magnetic Flux, 2014
Silver Deposit, Acrylic on Canvas
48 x 53 Inches

Pricing
Tommy Talbot
(415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com

Sloan Miyasato
2 Henry Adams Street, Suite 212
San Francisco, CA 94103

Hours
Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm

Curator
Michelle Bello Fine Art Consulting
(415) 317-5975 info@michellebello.com

Follow
News   Facebook   Twitter
Instagram   Google+   Pinterest

sloanmiyasatofineart.com

Marc Katano
Bianco e Nero, 2014
Acrylic on Nepalese Paper
59 x 57 Inches

Curator Michelle Bello at Sloan Miyasato Fine Art presents works by Marc Katano, a master of the ethereal and the expressive line. His newest large-scale paintings on paper once again hit their mark by combining the spontaneity of line with the physicality of paint or ink. With each piece the materials vary slightly, but all adhere to Katano’s interest in simple and natural movements. He is an intuitive painter whose works appear effortless. To achieve balance Katano applies dense strokes of paint in close proximity to one another, layering a darker form on a lighter form with rhythmic and nuanced patterns. Painting on handmade Japanese and Nepalese paper supplies a textural backdrop and evokes Katano’s respect for the natural world.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Katano currently lives and works in Northern California. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA, and has exhibited his work in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Katano Installation, 2014
Video by Katano Studios
1:14 Minutes

Marc Katano
Muse, 2014
Acrylic on Nepalese Paper
59 x 54 Inches

Marc Katano
India, 2014
Acrylic and Ink on Japanese Paper
58 x 38 Inches

Pricing
Tommy Talbot
(415) 431-1465 tommyt@sloanm.com

Sloan Miyasato
2 Henry Adams Street, Suite 212
San Francisco, CA 94103

Hours
Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm

Curator
Michelle Bello Fine Art Consulting
(415) 317-5975 info@michellebello.com

Follow
News   Facebook   Twitter
Instagram   Google+   Pinterest

sloanmiyasatofineart.com