Zina Al Shukri
We’ve just received a trove of small studies from Zina Al-Shukri. Composed on cardboard backings from her children’s comic books, the drawings comprise a diary of interior meanderings, dating from 2012.
In her first exhibition at PSG in 2011, Zina presented a series of gouache and charcoal portrait dyptych’s she painted while teaching in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Her young female Turkish students, ages 15 – 19, posed for two portraits, one with a hair covering called a Hijab (Arabic), or Eşarp (Turkish), and another without. Al-Shukri’s portraits deftly juxtapose secular and traditional identity, creating an interplay of bi-cultural dichotomies.
Zina Al-Shukri was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1978. She moved with her parents to the United States when she was 5 years of age. Al-Shukri received her BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and attended the California College of the Arts, receiving her MFA in 2009.
Zina Al-Shukri is an emerging artist whose exhibition history includes Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, and Pulliam Deffenbach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
Frederick Hayes
Frederick Hayes continues his exploration of African American portraiture, and urban landscape using charcoal and paint. Frederick Hayes’s exhibition takes the viewer on a walk through his city, albeit a fictionalized city. Hayes’s city is filled with faces both known and unknown; billowing cloud formations over geometric urban cityscapes; and detailed brick facades. Hayes comments, “I have an undeniable interest in portraiture, the African American experience, the working class, and the sort of learned approach to art making that manifests itself in various guises and disguises. Each idea or set of images represents a fragment that can function on its on or with other works. For me they are documents that narrate a small piece of what I observe and experience day to day. They are just as much about the materiality of the medium and its process, as they are about a community of thoughts.”
Art critic Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Hayesʼs subject might be defined as both the richness and harshness of urban life… Jane Jacobs saw cities as magnets for ‘people with ideas of their own’. These are the people Mr. Hayes paints.” On March 28th, 2010, Ms. Smith again references Hayes in a New York Times article she wrote about painting, “It’s not Dry Yet”: ” Frederick Hayes resurrects the loaded brush and charged forms of Max Beckmann, subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.”
In 2004, Frederick Hayes exhibited small paintings of radiators and large drawings of urban landscapes in his first exhibition at PSG. The Addison Gallery of American Art, The New Museum, SFMOMA, and The Studio Museum in Harlem were among the first museums to add Hayes drawings to their collections. Hayes received the Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Eureka Fellowship.
Jamie Vasta
Vasta’s medium of choice, glitter has an elemental resonance carrying unexpected emotional resonance, however her masterly domination of material transforms the bombastic bits of reflective color to mannered, painterly refinement. Staging actors, friends and family within the LGBTQ + community, Vasta’s narrative series focus on art historical movements, contemporary culture and literary tales.
In her first exhibition Mustn’t in 2007, Vasta reframed Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales depicting a mystical landscape where women with supernatural powers cavort in deadly play. Vasta’s second exhibition reflects the trophy portrait in glitter, this time with internet composites of adolescent females posed with their kill. Jamie Vasta then presented After Caravaggio – a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s historic paintings. Vasta posed her coterie of friends and colleagues with props of today, turning gender and context on end. After the Hudson River School positioned Vasta’s glitter on wood landscapes in the traditions of 19th century landscape painting. True to her predilection of revisiting art history with a contemporary spin, Vasta turned her eye to the San Francisco Bay Area landscape as filtered through the lens of the Hudson River School of artists.
Eurydice is a tale of great love and loss. Offering inspiration to great luminaries throughout history such as Peter Paul Rubens and Poussin, Jamie Vasta joins these historical icons with her homage to the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, a great musician whose father was Apollo and mother Calliope, descends to the underworld hoping to resurrect his bride Eurydice, who tragically dies from the the viper’s bite on the night of their wedding. He brings his lyre and power of song to woo the Lord of the Dead. Struck by his song the Lord allows Eurydice to ascend with Orpheus upon condition Orpheus not look back at Eurydice. As Orpheus enters daylight he turns to look at Eurydice who tragically still hovers in the dark cavern, condemning her to death forever.
From this tale of human limitations, Vasta depicts two costumed women in loose classical Maxfield Parrish like garments. The two actors enact film stills from a non-linear ghost story, playing out tableaus of grief and longing. In the bright silver works “The Dream” and “Tempest”, the figures become islands of color and solidity in the bleak desert beach. Scatters of prismatic glitter shoot sparks across the blown-out brilliant sky. A tender embrace turns to obsessive clutching and restraint, the sunny day turns harsh. In “Visitation” and “See Mystery Lights”, the loosely rendered figures emerge out of the darkness, disappearing when light reflects off the dark surface.
The most recent series of works (2024), The Pre-Raphaelites, are strikingly romantic, lush, and detailed. The original Pre-Raphaelites were a clandestine society of artists, founded in London in 1848. Inspired by the theories of the influential writer and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who argued that artists should devote themselves to truth found in nature, the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the British Royal Academy’s preference for Victorian subjects and styles; instead, championing subjects from literature and poetry, particularly those dealing with religion, love and death. They subscribed to a supposed moral, natural environnment found in the medieval era, which they viewed as the antithesis to the industrial age. Ruskin admired the Pre-Raphaelites dedication to working en plein air, their minute botanical accuracy, and their defiance of the prevailing codes of moral and artistic inquiry.
The Pre-Raphaelites melodramatic characteristics are a ‘Siren Call’ to Jamie Vasta, whose imagination is fueled by the beguiling amplification glitter delivers. I recommend you don those rose-tinted glasses and plunge into Queer splendor with reimagined Pre-Raphaelite-Queer portraits!!
Jamie Vasta received her MFA from the California College of Arts in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in Artillery, Art in America, Art Forum, art LTD, Modern Art Obsession, The Boston Globe, New York Times, SF Weekly, and The Bay Guardian. Vasta is included in many prestigious public and private collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.
Cornelia Schulz
Cornelia Schulz (b. 1936) lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. For close to 50 years she has honed her skills in abstract paintings of complex shape and color. Her early education in the arts began at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954 through 1957, the heyday of the California Ceramics Revolution. She studied sculpture in clay and wood with Renzo Fenci (1914 – 1999), and drawing from Herbert Jepson (1908 –1993). She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting (1959) and her Master of Fine Arts in welded steel sculpture (1961) from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).
Schulz began her teaching career at the University of California Davis Art Department in 1973, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2002. During her tenure at the University of California in Davis, Cornelia Schulz became the first female Chair of the Department of Art from 1988 to 1992, serving again in 1995.
Cornelia Schulz is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport; and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, California, as well as many national and international collections.
Joachim Bandau
Joachim Bandau began painting black watercolors in 1983. The paintings embody the political, aesthetic and spiritual discourse of his 50-year career. Nuanced in technique and posture, Bandau’s watercolors require a lithe balance; conversely the repetitive hatched drawings of his earlier years were scarred with the memories and gravitas of the Third Reich.
Using only black pigments, Bandau starts a series of paintings with a herculean session lasting many hours, brushing layer by layer, light to dark and edge to edge. Because the paintings dry between each application of pigment, the rhythmic accretion of layers takes months, if not years to resolve. Kenneth Baker, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, said of Bandau, “No one unfamiliar with watercolor should underestimate the feats of control that pieces such as this record. Just the right decisions regarding tools, materials and timing have to be sustained to achieve the look of effortless perfection Bandau gets.”
Whereas the technical acuity of achieving each painting is remarkable, it’s the unique visual experience that resonates. Dr. Katja Blomberg, a Berlin based art critic wrote, “Bandau stands by himself. As a sculptor he recreates shadows, objects, walls, rooms, floors, windows, gray on gray, with transparence and peace, as though from the distance of a remote state of consciousness.”
Joachim Bandau (b.1936) belongs to a protean group of German artists, along with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Imi Knoebel, who came out of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. Groundbreaking his exploration of form, in the late 70s, Bandau literally moved sculpture from above ground to underground. As with Carl Andre’s development of the floor sculpture, and Bruce Naumann’s concrete casting of the empty space under his chair, this new art form “Bodenskulptur”, Floor Sculpture, provided Bandau with an independent and important position.
For his participation in documenta 6, 1977, Bandau specified “Automobiles” (built by Mercedes Benz). Towering shapes in different human postures required a human “driver” who entered the sculpture only to be encased in a steel cocoon. When the door shut the occupant had visibility through a small horizontal window. As the automobile began moving there were no controls available to the occupant. The structures crashed into each other, then reversed their path until the next collision. They were bumper cars loaded with the symbolism of camp deportations and the reengineering of Post WWII Germany.
In the 1980s Bandau expanded the scope of his sculpture into a lead sea, or lead field, that today are in the Ludwig Museum collections of Cologne and Aachen. Again, the hatched graphite drawings of previous decades recede and the black watercolors known today come forward. He continued to explore and define sculpture in many future exhibitions, including “Inside-Outside. An Aspect of Contemporary Sculpture”, at the M HKA in Antwerp in 1987.
Joachim Bandau lives and works in Germany. He’s represented in over 45 museum collections including the Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum Nürnberg; Jewish Museum, Berlin; Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen; Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen; and the Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with over 20 public installations throughout Europe. Bandau’s work can be viewed at Art Basel, Art Cologne, Art HK12 Hongkong, along with other international art fairs.