Foreground: Laurel Roth. Food #5, Pig, 2009; walnut, gold leaf, Swarovski crystal. Background: Mary Anne Kluth. The Lorentz Fitzgerald Calculations, 2009, watercolor and acrylic with watercolor collage on paper. Image: Randall Miller. Mary Anne Kluth and Laurel Roth explore the possibilities and limitations of their materials in "Theory of the Unforeseen," a two-person show at Frey Norris Gallery. The two bodies of work co-exist harmoniously, although conceptual dialogue seemed limited to a shared but vague interest in scientific knowledge production. Equating painterly material investigation with scientific exploration of macro and micro bodies, Kluth's paintings on paper feature warm splashes... Read More

Mithila painting is a tradition of folk art created by and for women from the rural state of Bihar in northeastern India. Historically, they painted directly onto the walls of houses. These days, the paintings are done on portable materials such as paper and canvas, and represent an important source of income for the artists, who usually depict traditional Hindu religious stories and scenes of village life. In the recent past, a movement to professionalize their efforts has resulted in establishment of the Mithila Art Institute. Shalinee Kumari, whose first US exhibition is currently on view at Frey Norris, is... Read More

The eternal combat (or dance) between nature and culture, or, in traditional psychosexual terms, female and male, always gets reliable critical ink, but the artwork under discussion usually makes the rather banal point that we increasingly live in a mediated, artificial world of our own design--sad in certain respects, but not terribly interesting. Shen Shaomin, a mid-career artist who grew up as a Communist propagandist and developed, self-taught, into an independent, "heterodox" artist in the 1980s, has created a group of sculptures based on the techniques used to create bonsai trees, which he likens to foot-binding, the painful process that... Read More

Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens, showing at the Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, offers a taste of the brilliance of the English-born painter Carrington who has made her home in Mexico for over 50 years. The exhibition includes eleven oil paintings, several gouaches, watercolors, drawings and spans forty-five years of her career. Carrington is 90 years old and is one of the last surviving surrealists. She was part of a magical circle of ex-patriot artists, many part of the surrealist movement that found refuge in Mexico after Word War Two and included Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Luis Buñuel, and... Read More