ANEW

ANEW
January 8 – February 13

Opening Reception, Saturday,
January 10th, 4–6 PM – Please join us.

The exhibition brings together four contemporary artists working across a range of media, each with a distinct approach. Together, their work celebrates the new year and its sense of renewal, possibility, and fresh perspective.

Featuring James Torlakson and Jane B. Grimm,
and introducing Tara Esperanza and Eleanor Rahim.

Eleanor Rahim’s work explores the emotional and perceptual power of water through painting and drawing. Her images do not describe a specific place so much as a state of being, where motion, light, and depth converge in moments that feel both immediate and meditative.

Rahim’s layered surfaces capture the tension between solidity and flux. Waves crest, dissolve, and reform with a precision that feels observational yet deeply intuitive. Color plays a central role. Submerged greens, shifting blues, and luminous whites evoke the sea’s interior life, suggesting movement beneath the surface as much as what is visible above it. The scale of the compositions draws viewers into an immersive encounter, where the painting feels less like a view onto a scene and more like a lived, sensory experience.

Tara Esperanza’s succulent paintings continue her sustained exploration of botanical form, using these resilient plants as a framework for examining structure, color, and the quiet drama of growth. Her work reflects themes of connection, endurance, and renewal, revealing how living forms respond to pressure, proximity, and time.

Carefully composed, the succulents interlock and press against one another, creating a palpable sense of contained energy and tension. Backgrounds are reduced or softened, directing attention to the internal architecture of each plant. Repetition, variation, and rhythm work together to create visual harmony, while what may initially read as botanical realism gradually unfolds into something more abstract and psychological.

We are pleased to present new non-narrative acrylic paintings by James Torlakson in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, a body of work marked by spontaneous energy and vibrant color. The titles signal carefully considered color structures, each grounded in color theory and the laws of diminishing contrast. These principles have shaped Torlakson’s practice for decades, particularly within his realist work, where they heighten spatial depth and lived visual experience.

The exhibition also includes new realist works drawn from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and Playland at Rockaway. These paintings feature the artist’s iconic suburban landscapes, where moments of quiet grandeur emerge from the everyday. Torlakson’s realism is rooted in a sensuous engagement with the world and its reinterpretation through paint. He is less concerned with faithful replication than with transforming what he observes into a personal visual language. His paintings, watercolors, and etchings have been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, and his work is held in numerous permanent museum collections.

Jane B. Grimm’s Syncopation series is musically inspired, with amorphous forms grounded in biology, and her lifelong connection to the natural world. The four new Syncopation wall sculptures on view evoke coral reefs, Caribbean waters, and swirling tide pools.

Each Syncopation work is composed of countless hand-formed ceramic cups with linear texture, individually glazed and assembled onto a wooden panel that completes the composition. A pioneer of Pop Art, Grimm creates entirely handmade sculptures, both freestanding and wall-mounted. Using ceramic clay and a low-fire kiln process, she balances playful form with rigorous craftsmanship, resulting in surfaces rich with rhythm, movement, and tactile presence.

Please contact Andra Norris Gallery for more information.
650-235-9775
info@andranorrisgallery.com