Once again I had the pleasure of being in a show curated by Sven Davis. The show was a group exhibition featuring an international array of 15 artists at 886 Geary Gallery, in San Francisco. the exhibition opened July 11th, and was on view through July 27th, 2015.
Shapeshifters & Sharpshooters gathers a collective of artists from across the globe in an exploration of contemporary abstract art-making practices. Coming from a range of backgrounds varying from traditional art school teaching practices to graffiti writing, the group shares a common dynamic in their visual language.
The exhibition is a celebration of contemporary mark making whilst embracing and taking inspiration from traditional art movements such as Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Precisionism amongst others. A common disposition of the group is their use of Hard-Edge painting; a term first coined in the late fifties and used to describe intense and abrupt delineation of form and color within the burgeoning Geometric Abstraction and Op-art movements. Whilst these artists acknowledge and embrace movements of the past, they confidently stand outside of historical classification and have established themselves as a core group of protagonists defining a contemporary movement they have made their own.
The exhibition features the following artists: Chris Mendoza (Brooklyn, NY), Christopher Derek Bruno (Atlanta, GA), Clemens Behr (Berlin, Germany), Drew Tyndell (Nashville, TN), Eltono (Belvès, France), Jerry Inscoe (Portland, OR), Liam Snootle (Melbourne, Australia), Matthew Chavarria (Riverside, CA), Michael Bennett (Berlin, Germany), Nawer (Cracow, Poland), Poesia (San Francisco, CA), Richard Caldicott (London, UK), Sean Newport (San Francisco, CA), St Monci (Rochester, NY), Will Sears (Portland, ME).
