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

SHINGO FRANCIS INTERVIEW - Fondation D'Entreprise HERMÉS

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.

Exhibition Catalog for PHENOMENA is NOW AVAILABLE!

The catalog from the latest show at William Turner Gallery, PHENOMENA, is out now! The catalog is available on the official William Turner Gallery website and includes images and insights from PHENOMENA. The exhibition is part of the Getty presented event PST Art, Art & Science Collide. PST Art is the largest event in the United States, featuring over 800 artists at over 70 institutions in Southern California. PHENOMENA showcases art by Charles Arnoldi, Natalie Arnoldi, Ryland Arnoldi, Kelsey Brookes, Alex Couwenberg, Franco DeFrancesca, Lawrence Gipe, David Lloyd, Ed Moses, Jeff Overlie, Melanie Pullen, and Jennifer Wolf.

SHINGO FRANCIS + FONDATION D'ENTERPRISE HERMÉS TOKYO

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.