Opening Tonight from 5-8 at William Turner Gallery - Alex Couwenberg: HIGHLINE

Fastback, 2025, Acrylic & spray on canvas, 66” x 84”

Bomber, 2025, Acrylic & spray on canvas, 66” x 84”

A graduate of Art Center College of Design and Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg studied with Karl Benjamin, a pivotal figure in defining Southern California’s hard‑edge abstraction. Other influences are deeply woven into Couwenberg’s practice as well, ranging from the Finish Fetish movement—surfboard, custom‑car gloss, resin surfaces created with industrial rigor—to Light & Space’s subtle manipulations of perception. Couwenberg’s work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art & History, Laguna Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, and the Daum Museum of Art in Missouri. In 2007, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting.

Opening Reception Tonight 5-8PM

Opening this Saturday from 5-8 at William Turner Gallery - Alex Couwenberg: HIGHLINE

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 5-8PM

William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Alex Couwenberg: Highline, featuring the artist’s newest paintings. The exhibition opens with a reception on September 13, 2025, from 5–8 PM and runs through November 8, 2025.

In his latest series, Couwenberg orchestrates an ensemble of color, light, line and texture—each piece a visual improvisation that melds razor‑sharp precision with spontaneous intuition. His multilayered canvases pulsate with pearlescent glimmers and atmospheric gradients, where masking, spray techniques and hand‑scraped striations reference the sleek contours of ship hulls, car fins and coastal vessels. The forms are in restless motion - shifting, sliding, overlapping - one into the next. Light itself becomes a primary collaborator, dancing across surfaces in harmonic counterpoint to geometric forms and interrupted gridlines.

Couwenberg’s work taps into the visual rhythms of Southern California, where headlights and taillights play a noir contrapuntal beat to sunlight skittering across waves or filtering in gentle patterns through window blinds on a summer morning. In fact, Couwenberg likens his process to navigating a city: full of green lights, stop signs, and unexpected turns and views. This interplay between control and spontaneity animates the work, producing compositions that simultaneously convey tension and resolution. The resulting pieces are both formally rigorous and emotionally resonant—vivid reflections of an artist deeply attuned to the aesthetics of movement, light, and the layered complexity of memory and lived experience.

Born and based in Southern California, Couwenberg channels the contradictory dialectics of the region: the soft luminosity of ocean vistas and open sky versus the relentless linearity of urban freeway systems. His method—a reductive and additive layering ritual—recalls an abstract archaeology: excavated textures meet precise hard‑edge forms in a personal vernacular built from cultural signifiers and industrial gestures.

A graduate of Art Center College of Design and Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg studied with Karl Benjamin, a pivotal figure in defining Southern California’s hard‑edge abstraction. Other influences are deeply woven into Couwenberg’s practice as well, ranging from the Finish Fetish movement—surfboard, custom‑car gloss, resin surfaces created with industrial rigor—to Light & Space’s subtle manipulations of perception. Couwenberg’s work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art & History, Laguna Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, and the Daum Museum of Art in Missouri. In 2007, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting.

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 5-8PM

NUMINA - Closing Reception & Book Signing Featuring Music by Tom Hiel & the Poetry of Robert Sobul

William Turner Gallery invites you to join us in celebrating the closing reception and catalogue-signing for Numina on Saturday March 22 from 4 to 6pm. The last day to see Casper Brindle's solo show, Numina, is Saturday March 29!

The reception will feature performances by two Los Angeles-based creatives: pianist Tom Hiel and poet Robert Sobul. Tom Hiel is a pianist and composer, specializing in composing and producing for film and television. Hiel received an MFA in Music Composition from California Institute of the Arts. Writer Robert Sobul studied film at UCLA and screenwriting at the American Film Institute. His reading will include both new and archival work.

Refreshments will be provided!

CASPER BRINDLE: NUMINA DIGITAL CATALOG IS NOW AVAILABLE

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition catalog for Numina, Casper Brindle’s first solo exhibition at the gallery in four years. In the interim, Brindle has had numerous national and international exhibitions, including an extensive exhibition in 2022 at The Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA. Numina will run from January 25 - March 22, 2025.

Numina, presents two bodies of work, Light Glyphs and Veils, each of which involve dramatic investigations into light, color and the fluid, ever shifting nature of perception.  The exhibition ranges from painting to sculpture, and exemplifies Brindle’s restless experimentation and evolving modes of expression. The works are poetic, sensual and spatially dynamic. Utilizing automotive paints and pigmented acrylic, Brindle has created works that reflect and diffuse light in ways that are nuanced and engaging. 

A printed copy of the book will be available in either soft cover or in a limited edition hard cover. For information regarding obtaining a printed copy of the book please contact us via email.