Space, Place, and Order is a group exhibition of work by Tony DeLap, Miriam Bäckström, Gilles Barbier, Dennis Gallagher, Matthias Hoch, Candida Höfer, Amer Kobaslija, and Tommy Støckel. Each artist included utilizes their media – painting, photography, ceramics, and collage - to explore the way we make, use, and understand our constructed environments.

Tony DeLap’s canvases are visual magic tricks. Composed on flat canvases, his paintings turn sculptural before one’s eyes, as if making three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional form.

Similarly intrigued by illusion, Miriam Bäckström photographs film and television sets, allowing the unfinished edges of the deceptively ordinary rooms enter the frame; in effect, pointing to the constructed nature of our commonly experienced spaces.

Also engaging our perception of a typical domestic interior, My Living Room is a Martian Colony by Gilles Barbier, displays a living space peppered with directive notes that encourage the viewer to imagine an alternate site transported onto the space pictured.

Dennis Gallagher’s monolithic ceramic sculptures begin as roughly glazed, scored, and stacked clay blocks that combine to become architectonic constructions suggesting the many forms of our urban landscape.

Matthias Hoch’s carefully composed photographs extract the universal structures – the rhythmic geometry of a wall of alternating glass and concrete bricks, for instance - of modernist and contemporary architecture from the buildings’ particular place to explore the forms and spaces per se.

Candida Höfer’s photographs also focus on the structures of our built spaces, but turn more specifically to the way in which these spaces are composed; from libraries to museums, the institutional interiors she captures beg us to consider how we order our world.

In his paintings, Amer Kobaslija accesses space – in this case, the artist’s studio - through unexpected angles and expressive brushwork to affect an immediate and intimate portrait of personal space.

The intimate spaces of Tommy Støckel’s colorful grids is achieved through collage; variously populated, the miniature squares invite the viewer deeper into a world that functions as a simulacra of our own.

Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street
San Francisco (CA) 94108 United States
Tel. +1 (415) 9823292
info@renabranstengallery.com
www.renabranstengallery.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Friday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Saturday 11:00am - 5:00pm