Gregory Euclide Brings His Lush, Uncontainable Art to Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco
For “Extract,” Gregory Euclide brings his organic, overgrown sculptures, paintings, and mixed-media reliefs to Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco. The natural and the humanmade clash and converge in this solo show, reminding us of nature’s beauty as well as our increasingly tenuous relationship with it.
Euclide discovered a deep appreciation for nature during a childhood spent in his parents’ countryside home near a farm. “I spent every hour of sunlight outside,” he has said. “Looking back, I can see a direct link from that time to my current practice as an artist.”
Euclide now has a countryside home and studio of his own in the Minnesota River Valley. He gathers organic matter—reeds, ferns, plant clippings, grasses—from the area, then combines it with acrylic paint, sumi ink, steel panels, and other industrial material. These components come together in landscape scenes that foreground the richness of nature as well as the ways we encroach on it.
In Anywhere Kept the Frame Around Wanting (2015), a clutch of skyscrapers gives way to pine trees and a reflective pond that spills forward to the edge of the canvas, which has been crumpled and folded into a landmass-like form. Trees, plants, and acorns—not to mention pollutants such as chunks of styrofoam and plastic, also found by the artist—burst from every edge of the scene. Though Euclide transforms the styrofoam pieces into figurative rocks, they retain some of their unnatural appearance and serve as reminders of our presence in even the most pristine environment.
—Karen Kedmey
“Gregory Euclide: Extract” is on view at Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, Apr. 7–23, 2016.
