Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present Pre-Fall, our first solo show with Jenny Sharaf.

Known for her bold and bright paintings, California artist Jenny Sharaf presents Pre-Fall, a series of new paintings on fabric. Sharaf explores the intersection of contemporary art and fashion, investigating the industry’s constant need to outpace global trends with every new season and every instagram post. The exhibition's title is a nod to the fashion and art world’s need to be always new and forever relevant, especially as affected by digital ethos, disposable forecasted trends and social media.

Poured on the canvas in a stream of consciousness, Sharaf has a personal affinity for the materiality and historical context of paint and fabric. In the works, Sharaf has chosen a combination of pre-fall inspired tweeds, tartans, and ginghams as the base surface. Layered with loud splashes of color, the works create a tension between homogenization and expression, high and low brow culture, and fashion trends of the past and the present. Sharaf makes clear references to au courant runway looks from Gucci, Miu Miu, Chanel and Opening Ceremony, as well as reflecting on the canon of art history. “I want these paintings to feel like a fashion-forward avant-garde, art-power bitch headed to the Guggenheim. I’m also interested in the abstraction of high-fashion streetwear,” says the artist.

Jenny Sharaf is a multidisciplinary artist born in LA, living and working in San Francisco, CA. Her paintings, installations, murals, videos, and happenings celebrate process, and take cues from counterculture, feminism, and the history of abstraction. Sharaf’s saturated color palettes are referential to art history and pop culture. Her paintings stand-alone as vivid psychedelic paint pours swirling across large canvases or are applied directly to walls to create large immersive fields of color. She is best known for her large-scale, mural-like pour works on the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs and on Market Street in San Francisco.

She also works at a smaller scale with paint pours falling over magazine images of the female nudes from the 1960’s and 70’s to explore the history behind California’s female mystique. Pours are also applied to grand landscape images provoking a sense of nostalgia for a California; deepening and bringing light to what being a California artist means. Sharaf’s process is very intuitive and goes back and forth between digital and analog, connecting in formal and conceptual ways. Sharaf's work aims to make art and art environments that are simultaneously nuanced, accessible, and transcendent.

Sharaf earned her MFA from Mills College. Her work is in the permanent collections of Ace Hotel, Google, Rachel Zoe Inc, Capital One, Yoko Ono and more. She is currently working on some exciting fashion brand collaborations to-be-announced-soon and preparing for large-scale public wall paintings.