Leo Bersamina and David Huffman

Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition of recent works by Bay Area artists Leo
Bersamina and David Huffman.

The two-person presentation of Bersamina’s and Huffman’s new mixed-media paintings, with a floor sculpture by each artist, celebrates their complementary explorations in merging abstraction with figurative elements.
Evolving within each artist’s individual, larger narrative, their artworks explore history, memory and cultural
symbols.

Over the past few years and several bodies of work, David Huffman has engaged with ideas of space exploration, the figure of the astronaut, the basketball and even crystal meth. He has employed them for the associative content of their imagery, yet equally for their value as repeated formal motifs and, especially, as a way to abstractly address the picture plane. Elements of fantasy, social concerns and cultural/racial identity enliven this discourse. A vivid colorist, Huffman freely blends techniques associated with landscape and depiction of depth with pure pattern.

“I look for patterns we create through our living: relationships with forces of nature, and models created through
encounters with other people, experiences, travel, shelter, struggle, habit, and with our own genetic makeup.”
Leo Bersamina

Leo Bersamina enacts simultaneously with painting, photography and sculpture, sometimes incorporating several disciplines within one work. With a strong sense of materiality, he brings found stones and sticks into his sculptural and wall installations, using their volume and elemental presence to address the most basic formal properties of his art. Representational images of the sky and water (through gouache, watercolor and photo collage) contrast with the visceral qualities of paint and wood. Making keen use of his own life experiences, his works are layered with memory, markers of ethnic identity and spirituality.

Both artists were raised in the Bay Area, where their practices developed and they both eventually became
teachers of painting. Huffman is an Associate Professor at CCA (where he received his MFA); Bersamina is
currently a Professor at Diablo Valley College and has taught At UC Berkeley, Stanford and other colleges here
and abroad. Both Bersamina and Huffman are active in the arts community, have completed public commissions
of their work and have been supported and collected by local institutions.

The exhibition will take place at Anglim Gilbert Gallery’s second location at Minnesota Street Project, a new arts venue for the city of San Francisco.