3 artists stretch ideas of what paint can do in ‘Surface’
The daughter and niece of painters, gallery owner Andrea Schwartz left her native Texas to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1977.
The most unusual and well-known of the three is Klari Reis, who works with epoxy polymer, a UV-resistant plastic more typically seen in surfboards and industrial manufacturing.
Some works, like her “Systemic Circulation 5,” treat a 10-by-4-foot aluminum panel like a canvas, while another body of work, represented by “Hypochondria 30,” pours the epoxy into petri dishes, arranged on the wall.
Jeffrey Palladini is stretching the gallery’s conception of painting by working on the surface of LED video monitors in two new works.
In “Pool #24,” a painted figure of a woman looks out on sparkling water running in a three-minute video loop.
The imagery grows out of a series of oil- and charcoal-on-wood paintings Palladini made for a gallery show in Tel Aviv, represented here by two non-video works: “Not Quite Ready to Take That Step,” in which a man with a cigarette in his mouth nervously holds up one hand, and “Forever Misreading the Signs,” in which a woman looks over her shoulder.
The owner of Hang Art Gallery on Sutter Street, Spadaro makes textured, almost topographic single-color paintings by using various ground pigments and dyes from natural ground stones, sometimes mixing these with micro-fine glitters.