November 29, 2011

Bring Home some Holiday Cheer!





Masako Miki
(left) Things Don't Last Forever & (right) Always Better to Have Plan B, 2009
Collage, gouache on paper
34 x 27 inches
$1,800 each


Richard Lang
(center) Wreath 4, 2004
Pigment Print Edition 1/10
23x23
$650


Need some great gift giving ideas for your friends and family?

A World of Art Awaits:
*Join us here at the gallery to view our current exhibition or for an art placement appointment with one of our art advisors.  To schedule an appoinment with an advisor at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, in Fort Mason, please contact us at (415) 441-4777.

*Give an SFMOMA Membership!
Share the wonder of SFMOMA this holiday season by giving a full year of unlimited access to one of the nation's leading museums of modern and contemporary art. Members save 10 percent on gift membership purchases. Place your order before December 10 to ensure timely delivery for the holidays.
New! SFMOMA now offers a Family membership providing a year of access to our exhibitions and family-friendly programming, plus exclusive benefits and special treats designed just for families.

To give a gift membership today go online for fastest service and to help the museum save paper and resources or call 415.357.4135 (Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.). 
Click here, to review our membership levels and benefits.

November 11, 2011

Adrienne Defendi - Remembrance




Stephanie Peek, Annette Corcoran, Adrienne Defendi
November 11 - December 22, 2011
Opening Reception - Saturday, November 12
1:00 - 3:00 p.m

 

Adrienne Defendi
Remembrance 1 (Reader), 2011/2002
Photography
23 x 23 inches
Edition 1/6
$800

Adrienne Defendi
Remembrance 11 (Forza), 2011/2002
Photography
23 x 23 inches
Edition 1/6
$800

Adrienne Defendi
Remembrance 10 (Youth), 2011/1988
Photography
23 x 23 inches
Edition 1/6
$800

Artist Statement:

"I love feeling the weight of the camera, losing myself when photographing.
Observing what emanates from the stillness and the shadows.
I revel in the tensions between precision and chance, light and dark, the visible and invisible.

I began playing with a camera and image making at a young age with intense periods of formal photographic study along the way (RISD, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ICP, and numerous workshops).  From my graduate studies in Italian Literature to numerous teaching appointments in Italian and the Humanities, memory, myth, nostalgia, and mere beauty in the mundane have fascinated me and indeed continue to inform my photographic expression.  For the last ten years, I’ve photographed with low-tech cameras (Holga, Diana, pinhole), and have enjoyed experimenting with alternative processes, integrating spontaneity and serendipity into my artistic process."



Adrienne Defendi
Remembrance 4 (Solitude), 2011/1987
Photography
23 x 23 inches
Edition 1/6
$800


About the Rememberance series:

"In this series of photographs, I explore the relationship between decaying beauty and monumentality.  Having spent much time in Italy, I found myself drawn to these statuary works as they seemed overlooked, forgotten, and melancholic.  I imagined their importance when they were first created.  I imagined what history unfolded around them.  I imagined what they might have witnessed.  For me, these photographs symbolize forgotten narratives that beg to be retold and remembered.
These images were photographed with a 1956 Rolleiflex, a medium format twin lens reflex camera." -Adrienne Defendi



For more information on this show or to schedule an appointment with an art advisor, please contact the gallery at (415) 441-4777.

November 9, 2011

Stephanie Peek - Certian Riches




Stephanie Peek, Annette Corcoran, Adrienne Defendi
November 11 - December 22, 2011
Opening Reception - Saturday, November 12
1:00 - 3:00 p.m


Stephanie Peek
Without Time, 2011
Oil on panel
30 x 30 inches
$4,200

November's show explores the theme of Ars longa, vita brevis...or Art is long, life is short.  We are very pleased to have the work of three talented artists coming together for this very special show.  We do hope that you can join us for the opening reception, this Saturday afternoon!


About the work of Stephanie Peek:


"Fecund comes to mind. Profusion. Mystery. Loss.
Stephanie Peek’s recent still lifes are splendid and they are rarely still. Redolent of 17th century Dutch painting and brushed with a lavish and delicate hand, Peek’s work is also distinctly contemporary in its ambiguous surround. In variant choreographies, her flowers express attitudes of movement suspended in space. Atmosphere is aqueous. Gravity absent. Downward is up, forward back. Spaces are glimpses, less defined than suggested and they are radiant and unsettling...flowers turn, dip, glide and bow. Time expands. What emerge also recedes. Space feels voluptuous and forever. Seeing is the first part. Watching is the rest.

Naturalistic in their depiction, but not in their spatial surround, Peek’s floral sites are as assured as they are varied. Paint is washed, brushed, scraped, smeared and revisited. Often dark and always quiet, these flowered couplings and configurations form sorrowful evocations. Peek’s subject is less subject matter and more the nature of nature; a seductive and compelling exploration into the dark undertow of transience."
—Judith Foosaner, 2011




Stephanie Peek
Good Luck, 2009
Oil on panel
30  x 30 inches
$4,200


Stephanie’s inspirations for this body of work:


"For years the subject central to my art practice has been nature: from dark gardens as a kind of refuge, to camouflage patterns as a response to perpetual war, and always complex color fragments as a way of seeing. The genesis of this current body of work, Certain Riches, was an image of a rich red flower from a still-life by 17th century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch. I painted a loose rendering of that flower into the dark smoky atmosphere of an earlier night garden painting from my Dark Arcadia series, made at the American Academy in Rome in the late nineties. The deep red burned out of the darkness. I tried another color, then another until I was satisfied with the cascading of many colors through the deep space. In addition to floral borrowings from the dark Northern European tradition, there are also softer, lighter paintings which reflect the melancholy of early 18th century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau.  And in Requiem, the American Romantic painter Martin Johnson Heade is quoted with his iconic magnolias. Using flowers, leaves, insects from several sources, I also work from direct observation and photography. Suspended in silence, these flowers speak for me of fragile beauty and the ephemeral nature of worldly delights. Flowers traditionally represent the intransience of life, a kind of memento mori, yet the very fact that they ever existed can afford solace and be seen as an intimation of beauty as an immortal quality. Like paradise, the very absence of what once was causes us to long for it, a longing that may include melancholy, nostalgia even, but not only—also the hope that there is an unchanging principle behind beauty, a kind of soul, the idea of paradise as possible."—Stephanie Peek, 2011


Stephanie Peek
Transition, 2011
Oil on panel
30 x 30 inches
$4,200

For more information on this show or to schedule an appointment with an art advisor, please contact the gallery at (415) 441-4777.

November 2, 2011

Home for the Holidays

Don't forget to schedule an appointment to get your home ready for the Holidays!  The celebrations will be here before you know it.




Bruce Katz
Indian Corn, 2006
Oil on canvas
26 x 26 inches
$1,500

Bruce Katz
Candy Apples, 2011
Oil on canvas
19 x 15 inches
$900

Pat Doherty
Wrapped Candy I, 2010
Oil on canvas
6 x 6 inches
$250

Pat Doherty
Wrapped Candy II, 2010
Oil on canvas
6 x 6 inches
$250

The SFMOMA Artists Gallery will be CLOSED for the Holidays on these days:
Thanksgiving Weekend: Thurs, Nov 24th – Mon, Nov 28th
Winter Holiday Week: Sun, Dec 18th – Mon, Jan 2nd, 2012