May 15, 2025

SHINGO FRANCIS INTERVIEW - Fondation D'Entreprise HERMÉS

May 15, 2025/ William Turner Gallery/ William Turner

William Turner Gallery is pleased to share a recently released interview with Shingo Francis where he discusses his artwork, influences, and inspirations for the “Interference” exhibition at Maison Hermès Le Forum in 2023. Le Forum is an exhibition space housed in a glass-brick building designed by Renzo Piano. Flooded with natural light that forms an integral part of its identity, it is an oasis of contemplation inviting visitors to discover contemporary art in the heart of Tokyo’s dynamic Ginza neighbourhood. Directed by exhibition curator Reiko Setsuda, Le Forum offers an international programme bringing Japanese artists together with others from all over the world.

In addition to sharing Francis’ newly released interview with Foundation d’enterprise Hermès, William Turner Gallery is thrilled with Francis’ participation in the Japanese Pavilion at the Ōsaka Expo 2025.

Born in Santa Monica, California in 1969, Shingo Francis’ work explores the expansiveness of space and spirituality in painting. Francis has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Japan and internationally. His works are held in collections such as the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Banco de España, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Mori Art Collection, the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, the Oketa Collection, the Tokyo American Club, the Ueshima Collection, and Tiffany & Co.

INTERVIEW WITH SHINGO AT FONDATION D’ ENTREPRISE HERMÉS

TIME LAPSE OF THE INSTALLATION

Le Forum is an exhibition space housed in a glass-brick building designed by Renzo Piano. Flooded with natural light that forms an integral part of its identity, it is an oasis of contemplation inviting visitors to discover contemporary art in the heart of Tokyo’s dynamic Ginza neighbourhood. Directed by exhibition curator Reiko Setsuda, Le Forum offers an international programme bringing Japanese artists together with others from all over the world.

What is “interference”? Under this title, the first exhibition of 2023 invites the public to find answers through experience. Four artists explore our perceptions through the effects on the body of stimuli such as light, vibrations or soundwaves. Through stripped-back aesthetics, each of these artists highlights the subtle variations caused by the interferences to which our bodies are subjected in everyday life. Visitors are invited to contemplate the nature of perception through deeply felt sensations both physical and unconscious. The title, “Interference”, is borrowed from a series of paintings by artist Shingo Francis (b. 1969, United States): containing pigments that interfere with light, the colours of these canvases shift according to the viewer’s position. Nearby, an installation by Susanna Fritscher (b. 1960, Austria) immerses the viewer in a sensory experience of vibrations and pulsations beyond the frequencies that we are capable of hearing. Finally, Bruno Botella (b. 1976, France) presents pieces that stimulate our subconscious perception through tactile sensation, while Aiko Miyanaga (b. 1976, Japan) invites visitors to embark on a cosmic journey – the ultimate sensation, transcending time and space – through a tea ceremony shared online.

EXHIBITIONS AT HERMES LE FORUM

SHINGO FRANCIS

May 06, 2025

JIMI GLEASON: Vapor Wave - Digital Exhibition Catalog

May 06, 2025/ William Turner Gallery / William Turner

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Vapor Wave, a solo exhibition by Jimi Gleason, opening April 5 and running through May 31, 2025.

Vapor Wave is Jimi Gleason’s most ambitious body of work to date. Utilizing a rich vocabulary of materials and styles, Gleason has built up gossamer thin layers of iridescent paint to create a series of paintings that are engagingly enigmatic. They confirm an artist at the height of his talent, confidently exploring the power of nuance and understated expression.

In this new series, vaporous ribbons of color play across lustrous surfaces that morph and shift as one engages them. The effect elicits a sense of unexpected revelry - much like the kind one might experience gazing across a lake in a predawn moment, captivated by the growing light as it caresses and undulates across the water’s surface.

And like water, Gleason’s surfaces are quietly in motion, their iridescent paints subtly shifting in hue as light plays across them. In some of the canvases, sharp diagonals bifurcate the compositions, providing dramatic structural rifts to these ethereal surfaces. The effect is a hypnotic and prismatic visual structure, where light, color and form intersect in ever-changing play. Gleason has a uniquely personal connection to water: he grew up surfing, and took up rowing in college. When he talks about his work he also talks about, “the way the light looks underwater,” and early mornings rowing when the calm water reflects the sky at dawn.

Like many artists working in the Light and Space arena, materials and their catalytic visual effects are essential to their work. In Gleason’s case, he employs silver nitrate and pearlescent paints to activate his surfaces, which catch and reflect surrounding light, further engaging one’s sense of the surrounding space. Gleason is a leader in that next generation of Southern California artists to work in the Light and Space ethos, carrying the dialogue forward and using his work of art to explore the phenomenological properties of perception.

Born in Newport Beach, CA, Gleason received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1985. He 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, Gleason was employed in the studio of Ed Moses for five years. Combining the disparate technical and compositional skills developed during his exposure to printmaking, photography and mixed media painting, Gleason is now the subject of considerable curatorial and critical attention.

Gleason’s work is exhibited in significant public institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Long Beach Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.The artist’s paintings are actively collected by a growing number of major public and private collections around the world.

VAPOR WAVE

January 11, 2025

CASPER BRINDLE: NUMINA - Exhibition Postponed until January 25, 2025

January 11, 2025/ William Turner Gallery/ William Turner

CASPER BRINDLE: NUMINA
JANUARY 25 - MARCH 22, 2025
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 25, 5-8PM

William Turner Gallery would like to extend our heartfelt sympathies to everyone impacted by the devastating fires in Los Angeles.

In light of these events, our upcoming exhibition, Casper Brindle: Numina, will now open 5-8 PM on January 25, 2025, a week later than originally scheduled. The gallery will continue to remain open during normal business hours,11AM-6PM Tuesday- Saturday, subject to safety advisories from The City of Santa Monica. Go to santamonica.gov or lafd.org for the latest fire & safety information.

To our wonderful community of artists, patrons, partners, clients, neighbors, we hope you're staying safe and look forward to seeing you soon.

Resources and support for those who need it can be found at the following link:
https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=1014-resources-to-support-those-during-the-l-a-fires

October 23, 2024

HYPERALLERGIC Names Mark Steven Greenfield a top 10 show to see in October

October 23, 2024/ Ronald Silverman Gallery/ William Turner

Mark Steven Greenfield, “Saartjie Baartman” (2020), gold leaf and acrylic on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches (~61 x 61 cm) (photo by Rob Brander, courtesy William Turner Gallery)

Auras features two bodies of paintings by Mark Steven Greenfield — Black Madonna (2020) and HALO (2022) — that reconsider the breadth of the Black experience in the Americas by excavating and reframing contested histories. HALO comprises portraits of influential Black figures, from the revered to the lesser-known, including Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint Louverture, famed magician Black Herman, and silhouette artist Moses Williams — formerly enslaved by Charles Willson Peale — portrayed as saintly icons surrounded by gold leaf. Black Madonna depicts a beatific ebony Madonna and child, while Ku Klux Klan members and monuments to white supremacy are vanquished and toppled in the background.

HYPERALLERGIC

September 28, 2024

LIGHT MATTER - PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE - Exhibition Catalog Now Available

September 28, 2024/ William Turner Gallery/ William Turner

William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Light Matter, the first of two exhibitions, in partnership with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which explore the intersections and influences between art and science.

Light Matter showcases the influences of scientific research on artistic process and intention, and builds on a collaborative experiment that began with LACMA’s innovative Art & Technology program, a collaboration between artists and industry that ran from the late 60s to early 70s. As part of this initiative, Robert Irwin and James Turrell collaborated with NASA scientist and psychologist Ed Wortz at the Garrett Corporation. Together they developed a series of art and science-based investigations into the dynamics of perception, with a special emphasis on sensory deprivation. This intrigued Irwin and Turrell, who began to notice that perceptions were heightened after sessions in sensory deprivation tanks. Perhaps, they reasoned, the purpose of the work of art wasn’t as much about the work, as it was about the experience of perceiving the work. Enter Light & Space in Southern California, where the emphasis shifted from looking at art as “object”, to art as “experience”.

Artists in Light Matter continue to expand on this notion, experimenting with the possibilities of their materials, often through scientific research and innovation, to achieve heightened visual effects that engage the viewer in the wonder of the phenomenology of perception. They utilize materials and approaches that inspire the viewer to reflect - not only on “what” they are perceiving, but “how”. Many of the pieces require the viewer to interact with the works in unexpected ways - either by encouraging unusually active movement around, or stillness before, their works. The act of viewing engages the senses and heightens our sense of perception.

Light Matter includes work by Dawn Arrowsmith, Larry Bell, Casper Brindle, Shingo Francis, Jimi Gleason, Eric Johnson, Jay Mark Johnson, Peter Lodato, Andy Moses, and Roland Reiss.

EXHIBITION CATALOG

September 14, 2024

Opening This Evening from 4-8PM - LIGHT MATTER - PST ART: Art & Science Collide

September 14, 2024/ William Turner Gallery/ William Turner

Learn more

William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, California - is pleased to present Light Matter, the first of two exhibitions in partnership with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which explores the intersections and influences between art and science.

Light Matter explores the influences of scientific research on artistic process and intention, and builds on a collaboration that began with LACMA’s innovative Art & Technology program, a collaboration between artists and industry that ran from the late 60s to early 70s. For a number of artists, this unique program led, unexpectedly, to a significant new way seeing and thinking about the purpose of a work of art. Enter Light & Space in Southern California, where the emphasis shifted from looking at art as “object”, to art as “experience”.

Artists in Light Matter continue to expand on this notion, experimenting with the possibilities of their materials, often through scientific research and innovation, to achieve heightened visual effects that engage the viewer in the wonder of the phenomenology of perception. They utilize materials and approaches that inspire the viewer to reflect - not only on “what” they are perceiving, but “how”. Many of the pieces require the viewer to interact with the works in unexpected ways - either by encouraging unusually active movement around, or stillness before, their works. The act of viewing engages the senses and heightens our sense of perception.

Light Matter includes work by Dawn Arrowsmith, Larry Bell, Casper Brindle, Shingo Francis, Jimi Gleason, Eric Johnson, Jay Mark Johnson, Peter Lodato, Andy Moses, and Roland Reiss.

Dawn Arrowsmith’s paintings are meditations in color, engaging the viewer in a kind of minimalist luxury – pure, distilled, but also rich, and luscious. Her work is intuitive, greatly influenced by Buddhist philosophy and by her travels to the Orient. These pieces play on the retinal effects from extended viewing, where an image that appeared flat & monochromatic takes on volume and appears to shimmer. Arrowsmith’s paintings, sculptures and installations have been exhibited in the USA and abroad. Exhibitions sites include the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Barnsdall), the Clark Humanities Museum Gallery in Claremont, CA, the Riverside Art Museum, the Eli Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, the Lidovy Gallery in Prague, Czec. and the Campo d'Osservazione in Gubbio, Italy. Arrowsmith was born in San Francisco, California and received her M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate School, Visual Arts, Claremont, California.

Larry Bell is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, alongside Ferris Gallery contemporaries Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin. Bell is known foremost for his investigations of the properties of light, reflection and shadow on various surfaces, and how these properties affect our sense of space. Bell’s significant oeuvre extends from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design. About his sculptures, he has said: “Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.” Harnessing a little known technique developed for aeronautics, Bell utilizes a high-vacuum coating system that allows him to deposit thin metal films, which catch and reflect light, onto a variety of surfaces, which include his glass sculptures, paintings and works on paper. Bell’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, LA, among many others.

Casper Brindle has become widely recognized for paintings and sculptures that invite the viewer into a rhythmic dance with light, as it is reflected, diffused and distilled through his work. Brindle also utilizes a variety of industrial materials - airbrush, auto paints, resin, and pigmented acrylic - to create sculptures and paintings that shift and change as one moves around them. Atmospheric colors are encased in cultural surfaces in a constant push and pull between depth, light and color. Casper Brindle grew up surfing the beaches along LA's coast during the 1970's and 80's, and worked for Light and Space artist, Eric Orr, in the late 1980’s. Brindle’s work is in the permanent collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, CA and has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA.

Shingo Francis grew up in Los Angeles, immersed in the intense light and vast ocean vistas of life in southern California. Like many LA artists, Francis became fascinated with the ever-changing qualities of light and how it affected one’s perception and experience of the world. As the son of painter Sam Francis, Shingo also happened to grow up in the heart of LA’s nascent art scene, where artists such as Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Craig Kaufman and Peter Alexander were utilizing new materials to explore the effects of light on perception. Francis has continued this pursuit with a series of gossamer-like paintings with colors that appear in constant flux, changing as one moves about them. Utilizing interference paints – a medium of crushed, titanium-coated mica that refracts light - the colors in these pieces shimmer and shift depending on the angle of the viewer and the reflection of light. Rectangular shapes conform to the shape of the canvas, creating a framework of change as viewers move. What one sees becomes inherently tied to their particular perspective and the character of the light at any given time. Shingo Francis has been the subject of numerous national and international exhibitions. He was awarded the Fumio Nanjo Award from the Mori Museum in Tokyo and is in numerous museum and institutional collections, including The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles.

Jimi Gleason has spent his career exploring the reflective possibilities of light. Mixing nontraditional materials such as silver nitrate with pearlescent paints, Gleason’s surfaces are highly reactive to light and shifts in the viewer’s position. His silver deposit surfaces act as enigmatic mirrors that are activated by the viewer and the environment in which they are situated. Light, color and form are in constant flux with the external world, inducing an interactive, meditative experience with the viewer. Jimi Gleason was born and raised in Southern California. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 1985, later moving to New York. Upon his return to California, Gleason worked as a studio assistant for renowned painter, Ed Moses. Gleason’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, CA, the Laguna Art Museum, CA, and has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, CA, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Tucson Museum of Art.

Eric Johnson utilizes polyester resin and color-shifting pigments, to create sculptures that are exquisitely sensual and dynamic in how they reflect and absorb light. They recall the materials of the surf and car culture of the late 60s and early 70s in Southern California, employed by many artists like DeWain Valentine, Craig Kaufman and Billy Al Bengston. Johnson embraced the hot-rod culture as well and has made customized car bodies for the Porsche 962 and has lovingly overhauled vintage cars-as evidence by the two toned 1939 Chevrolet panel truck and fire engine red 1934 Ford pickup that sit to one side of his studio. As often was the case for many artists working in the 1970s, industrial products found their way into Johnson’s early studio practice and have remained there ever since. “I’ve translated all that automotive knowledge into making my artwork”,” he says. “I use the full array of auto tools and pigments.” The handcrafted abstract works are sheathed in resin skins, often revealing glimpses of skeletal armatures and hidden architectures. Other influences have been the aerospace industry and an ancestral boat builder heritage. Initially the constructs hid their “bones” under a “skin”, time capsule artifacts within. Over the past twelve years, the structures have become more organic and revealing. The current work merges Johnson’s passion for depth and structure with an obsession for color and surface. Johnson’s work is in the collections of the Oakland Museum, CA, the Laguna Beach Museum, CA, the UC Irvine Museum, CA and the Hamano Institute, Tokyo, Japan.

Jay Mark Johnson has rigorously pursued the possibilities of timeline photography over the last two decades. His artwork captures the fluid gestures of Tai Chi and dance, the rush of cars, trains and people, and the infinite cycling of beachfront waves. But within his images the rules for representing reality have shifted. Shadows are crisscrossed and the relative speed of an object determines its size. Moving objects appear isolated from their backgrounds and the backgrounds themselves have been decimated. In this manner, the results of Johnson’s process become a metaphor for the process itself. Held by prestigious private institutions and public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe, Johnson’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Langen Foundation and Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe.

Peter Lodato began making work in the late 1960s as part of the West Coast-specific Light and Space movement. Aligned with the concerns of his contemporaries, Lodato first constructed light installations that explored the nature of perception and the way that physical environments could be transformed into immersive experiences for the viewer. Lodato’s paintings evolved from his preliminary drawings for these installations and eventually, Lodato was able to recreate the illusive effect of light with color, form, and canvas alone. Always fascinated by the uncertainty of human perception, and the duplicitous nature of vision, which can be both revealing and deceitful, Lodato creates paintings that delve into this duality. Initially, Lodato’s paintings appear as austere, geometric abstractions. Yet, upon further observation, the paintings begin to vibrate: brushstrokes become evident and the surface reveals that there are numerous layers beneath. The hard edges of his often bi-chromatic works dissipate into sensuous fields of color that seem to push space in and out. Lodato’s reductive, divided compositions are visual confrontations between the planar simplicity of form and the resonance of particular pigments. A disciple of the AbEx color field painter, Barnett Newman, Lodato’s sumptuously colored canvases echo Newman’s concept of using division as a way to merge different areas of the canvas into a sublime whole. Much like Newman’s “zips” of color, Lodato’s vertical bands draw the viewer deeply into the picture plane, causing them to intensely experience the work, both physically and emotionally. The Frederick Weisman Foundation curated an extensive solo retrospective of Lodato’s work in 2000 and his work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Peter Lodato is in numerous esteemed collections both public and private including the Brooklyn Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

Andy Moses, utilizes techniques that facilitate his almost obsessive study of the alchemical properties of paint. The paintings that emerge articulate the abstract nature of perception, reaching beyond the material and tapping into the visceral. The images reveal undeniable traces of natural phenomena, seeking not to replicate the natural world, but to replicate the forces of nature itself. The artist’s complex process of mixing and pouring paint conveys a sense of undulating energies pushing and pulling within the rectilinear and circular forms of the canvases themselves. The paintings are sweeping and luminescent, their lustrous surfaces seemly executed with an impossible combination of absolute precision and wild improvisation. Meandering lines of psychedelic chroma oscillate between vivid sharpness and dissolving washes of color, achieving works of captivating presence. Viewing the work from multiple perspectives, one is swept into an interactive dance, as light plays across the surfaces in lustrous, ever-changing hues. Andy Moses is in numerous important private and public collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, CA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, the Laguna Beach Museum, CA, and has been exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum, CA, the Bakersfield Museum of Art, CA, the Lancaster Museum of Art & History, CA, the Frederick R, Weisman Art Foundation, CA, and California State University. He received his BFA from Cal Arts and lives and works in Venice, California. Andy Moses just enjoyed a survey exhibition at the Santa Monica College Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery that explored 30 years of his artistic output.

Roland Reiss was born in Chicago in 1929 and had a long and influential history in the LA art scene. Reiss’ early work owed a lot to Abstract Expressionism, but while he was teaching at the University of Colorado in the late 60s, Reiss began experimenting with the dynamic properties of resin and new plastic materials to explore their interactive properties with the viewer. Reiss soon moved towards making work informed by the Conceptualist movement of the 70s, but he had a profound impact on one of his students, who also began making resin sculptures. That student was DeWain Valentine, who would become one of LA’s most significant Light & Space artists. At the apex of his career, Reiss felt “I have no more stories to tell.” As critics and curators declared painting dead, he had already started investigating hundreds of studies for painting. His intent was to “take painting beyond where it has been,” believing it is impossible to deplete the possibilities of any medium. What seems like the product of gestural spontaneity are actually extensively rehearsed moves. He describes his work as “energy fields and spaces in which forms are operative and you can interact with visually. ”After earning BA and MA degrees at UCLA (1952-56), he taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and, in 1971, was named Chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University. At CGU he held the Benezet Chair in the Humanities, and in 2010, an endowed chair in art was established in his name. His work has been exhibited internationally, recognized by no fewer than four NEA Visual Arts Fellowships, among many other honors, and is to be found in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections in this country and abroad, among them the Hammer Museum, CA, the Oakland Museum, CA, the Laguna Beach Museum, CA, and the Orange County Museum of Art, CA.