Hosfelt Gallery is thrilled to present its first exhibition in collaboration with the Conner Family Trust — a show which mines 60 years of work by Bruce Conner and Jean Conner (as well as by Anonymous, Anonymouse, Emily Feather and Signed in Blood), across the genres of drawing, collage, assemblage and painting — highlighting shared themes and recurring motifs. 150 works, some from the private collection of Jean Conner and many never exhibited before, illustrate the artists’ intertwined interests in mysticism, religion, social and cultural norms, the natural world and the human body.
Bruce Conner (1993 – 2008) and Jean Sandstedt (b.1933) met on a blind, double date in 1954 at the University of Nebraska, where they both studied art. They married on September 1, 1957 and left that night for San Francisco, where they quickly fell in with the Beat-era community of artists and poets. The Conners, like other Bay Area artists, refused to conform to the expectations defined by the art establishment of New York, instead embracing the lack of commercial viability of their artworks and their outsider status in ways that led to highly experimental and original art forms.
Then, in the autumn of 1961, spurred by Bruce’s fear of the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the intention to live cheaply, the Conners moved to the Juárez neighborhood of Mexico City. The year they lived there proved highly inspirational. Forays to historic churches and pyramids; Dia de los Muertos, and the funeral rites of strangers; a hunt for psilocybin mushrooms; the birth of their son; and day-to-day living in a foreign city and culture led them to independently create related bodies of work that would presage concepts, motifs and techniques they’d explore for the rest of their lives.
This exhibition – by tracing those seminal, symbolic vocabularies and technical strategies – surveys the practices of two remarkable late 20th and early 21st century voices.
The second presentation of 8-bridges is now live. The November gallery list includes: Altman Siegel, Berggruen, Haines, CULT Exhibitions, Karen Jenkins Johnson, Paulson Press, Rena Bransten, and Hosfelt.
Each month, the platform highlights the crucial work of a Bay Area non-profit arts organization as its beneficiary. An initial contribution is led by Phillips. This month, we feature Creative Growth, a non-profit based in Oakland, CA that serves artists with disabilities by providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition, and representation.
The second discussion under the rubric “Bridging the Bay Area Art World” is a Zoom panel with Susan Sayre Batton (Director, San Jose Museum of Art), Thomas P. Campbell (Director, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Monetta White (Director, Museum of the African Diaspora), chaired by journalist Jori Finkel (of The New York Times and The Art Newspaper) on Wednesday, November 18, 2020 at 6pm.
Future presentations on the platform will launch on the first Thursday of every month and will include an evolving roster of galleries and contributors.
Twenty-four years ago, Lordy Rodriguez (b. 1976, Quezon City, Philippines) started using a visual lexicon of map-based forms as metaphors for defining an individual’s position within a culture or society. For his sixth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Rodriguez utilizes this ever-developing, cartography-inspired vocabulary to ruminate on issues about the immutable appeal of democracy and its very precarious existence.
Like many of us, Rodriguez is a news junky— fixated on unfolding stories of unequal access to resources; the violent quelling of peaceful demonstrations in Hong Kong, Minsk and Washington D.C.; and governments that murder journalists, poison political rivals or enact laws to disenfranchise their citizenry. The work in this exhibition — two new bodies of large-scale drawings — focuses on the bravery inherent in demanding a place at the table.
The first series memorializes historic and contemporary efforts at peaceful demonstration. These include the 1930 Salt March, led by Mohandas Gandhi challenging British rule over India; the Langa March of 1960, in which between 30,000 and 50,000 demonstrators marched in opposition to apartheid; the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery; and recent pro-democracy protests against Mainland China’s oppression in Hong Kong. In Rodriguez’s cartographic lexicon, these routes are “code-switched” in candy-colored references to race and oppression.
The second group of drawings represents efforts by those in power to manipulate the boundaries of voting districts in order to favor a political party or racial group, thereby diminishing the voting power and political voice of others. While researching these gerrymandered districts, his very personal “ah-ha moment” came when he realized many of them were districts in which members of his large and far-flung, Filipino-American family live — states like Texas and Florida with large immigrant populations.The pieces in this series represent some of the most egregious examples of voter suppression as well as districts in which activists and courts have compelled boundaries to be re-drawn in ways that are more equitable.
After having trained as an architect, Algerian artist, Driss Ouadahi (b. 1959, Casablanca, Morroco) emigrated from post-colonial North Africa to study painting at the renowned Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany. Influenced by his lived experience as an émigré he has developed a unique visual vocabulary – a synthesis of structural design and modernist grid painting – which he uses to explore the social, political and psychological aspects of boundaries and the possibility of transcending them.
Driss Ouadahi was born in Morocco in 1959 to parents who were Algerian political exiles. His work was exhibited in the Cairo Biennial in 2010 and The Future of a Promise: Contemporary Art from the Arab World during the 2011 Venice Biennale. He was awarded the grand prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2014. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including in Dubai, New York, North Africa and throughout Europe.
Hosfelt Gallery presents a solo exhibition of work by the esteemed painter, calligrapher, and Rinzai Zen monk Max Gimblett. The exhibition, entitled juggernaut, opens September 8, 2020 and is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.
