Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present our Summer Selection, featuring handwoven textiles, chiseled marble sculpture, and luscious impasto paintings from both gallery-rostered and guest artists. Please join us for our opening reception on August 7th, 5-7 pm. Artists Kim Cogan and Rachel Simkover will be in attendance. Celebrating an internationally-curated experience of the season, this exhibition presents a metaphoric common ground and braids moments emblematic of the Aegean seaside, painterly scenes of our local Pacific vista, and lingering afternoons on a beachfront deck. The exhibition invites the viewer to embrace the spirit of the summer through a myriad of colors, line, and form.
Participating Artists Include: Kim Cogan, Simon Nicholas, Anne Mei Poppe, Rachel Simkover, Nathaniel Kyung Smith and Sophie Westerlind.
Kim Cogan is a Korean-born American painter residing and working in San Francisco, CA. His work explores the boundaries between realism and memory. His rooftop panoramas, composed city scenes and impressionistic figures are grounded in explorations of place and characterized by an atmospheric intentionality. By using light, color and contrast, he exploits paint’s tactile form to create a mood and convey emotional content. Cogan’s work captures the passage of time and vanishing landscapes, the relationship between structured and natural forms and the iconography of our memories. Kim Cogan is an award-winning artist who has exhibited paintings to great acclaim nationwide. His work has appeared in ARTnews Magazine, ART FORUM, the San Francisco Chronicle, American Arts Quarterly, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy and American Art Collector Magazine.
Simon Nicholas deals with the identity of crowds, and, coupled with a remarkable sense of composition, he has come up with a new vision of urban space. Putting painting back in the limelight is the other feat of this exhibition: here is a theme whose subject allows the artist to display his use of oil paint on the cusp between tradition and novelty. The æsthetic commitment in these paintings reveals something of Simon Nicholas’ background: the work is close in spirit to that of the younger generation of a School of London. By distinguishing each individual through chromatic and expressive brushstrokes, Simon Nicholas manages to convey multiple presences. He represents lives which balance between a new and immutable community, punctuated by a solitude which is no longer a condition of melancholy but the joyous expression of light and nuance, qualities intrinsic to painting.
Anne Mei Poppe‘s work examines the interconnectedness of life and explores how humans, nature, and objects are intertwined in a delicate web of existence. Her paintings are on the interception of figurative and abstract, often balanced and joyful, embracing organic forms and vivid colors. Poppe creates depth in her paintings by building and breaking down layers to translate the often complex relationships between people. Painting intuitively, each brushstroke is a dialogue with the subconsious and a visual manifestation of emotions. Ultimately, her work is an invitation to find resonance in the shared human experience and our interconnectedness. Poppe’s work is a tribute to the intricate dance of life, one where humans, nature, and objects are all intertwined in a delicate web of existence.
Rachel Mari Simkover is a Japanese-American visual artist. Currently working as a textile weaver, Simkover originally studied painting and printmaking at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and Goldsmiths University of London. Her interest in artists’ books lead to a self-publishing project under the moniker Book Hook Editions, participating in book fairs such as the Artist Self-Publishing Fair in London and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair in Los Angeles. Working professionally as an interior design materials specialist redirected her art practice towards textiles and hand weaving. She completed a residency at the Icelandic Textile Art Center in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include “Deflected” at /room/ in San Francisco and “Fun House” at SLOT Gallery in Sydney.
Nathaniel Kyung Smith grew up in a small Minnesota town, near the Grand Marais on the edge of Lake Superior. Dreamily he recalls how “…the water was so still and clear you could see hundreds of feet underwater.” Smith would boulder among the natural rock formations on the edge of the lake, and stack rocks on the beach, fiddling away hours studying shapes and objects in his surroundings. Significant markers of his childhood were spent working at his parent’s flower shop. Smith’s figurative work references modernist sculpture, including cubism, surrealism, neoclassicism and naturalism.Smith sculpts figurative works in stone, ceramic, and other hard materials. The use of traditional materials is an intentional tool bridging human experience through the arch of history. With a background in religion, philosophy, and art history, the Artist is concerned with frameworks for approaching truth within the limitations of power structures. He was trained under master stone carver Joanne Duby.
Sophie Westerlind‘s paintings offer a profound exploration of the complexities of the human body and its many stages of life. Her work focuses on the recurring themes of the female form, body language, and the ways in which we use movement to express ourselves. Through her art, Westerlind seeks to delve deep into the nuances of how we inhabit our bodies, and how we communicate with others through physicality. She uses loose, bold, and dynamic brush strokes, which create a sense of movement in her paintings, capturing the intensity of the human experience. The fast way of working, the fluidity and spontaneity in how she uses only one brush mark to create a shape, gives her paintings a sense of immediacy and vitality.
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