A Matter of Form

K.Imperial Fine Art is pleased to present A Matter of Form, a brand new group exhibition featuring the latest works by Susan English, Mel Prest, Steven Alexander, and Shingo Francis. Each artist presents their own unique interpretation and configuration of the color field. Regarded together, their work is a varied journey of color and surface, exploring the effects these attributes can have on a viewer. The exhibition will be on view from September 9th – October 18th, 2025. The gallery and the artists welcome the public to the opening reception on Saturday, September 13th, from 3-5 p.m.

Steven Alexander is a Pennsylvania-based abstract artist who has over fifty years of experience as a painter and has been featured in more than one hundred exhibitions internationally. Alexander has formulated a unique language within the genre of reductive abstraction, building upon legacies of artists like Rothko and Mondrian who regarded the experience of viewing art as a meditative encounter. His supple, layered facture and simple geometric color arrangements mirror the viewer, drawing out “rhythms, tensions, and dualities of the body and the psyche.” Each work invites a synesthetic, full-body engagement.

Susan English is a New York artist notable for the technique she has developed of mixing and pouring tinted polymers onto panels. While her colors and technique require a high degree of precision, the movement of the paint cannot always be predicted after it pours. English expertly adapts to this uncertainty and incorporates it into each piece. Her swaths of deeply-saturated pigment evoke a feeling of vastness and calm, like staring out over a horizon at dusk or dawn. Though rooted in monochrome, her multi-panel works push color to its limits—turning abstraction into quiet, luminous landscapes that shift with time and perspective. The New York Times has described her work as “sublime” and “buoyant.”

Shingo Francis is an American-Japanese artist who grew up in both California and Tokyo. He is deeply interested in the emotional and sensory effects that color can transmit. His color fields conjure up immersive environments: carefully-considered lines of energetic scarlet cut across swaths of indigo; lively green juts out over pearly, billowing lavender. With their great expanses of color, and detail concentrated at the bottom, each piece gives the impression of a horizon on an alien world. Unique harmonies arise out of the dialogues between colors.

Mel Prest is a San Francisco-based abstract artist whose work is focused on color and perceptive visual relationships. Her arrangements record colors that stand out to her in everyday life: The striking contrast of autumnal foliage surrounded by green is distilled into an all-red painting; the smell of blooming lilacs becomes a lattice of purple; the light of the setting sun from behind a cloud resolves into a glowing green composition. Prest’s most recent body of work juxtaposes the mechanical and the organic. From afar, these pieces appear to be almost machinelike in their perfection, but up close the brushwork indicates that the pieces are hand-painted.

A Matter of Form will be on display from September 9th – October 18th, 2025. The gallery is by appointment only. Please contact the gallery at  kimperialfineart@me.com or 415.277.7230 for inquiries or to make an appointment.