Gregory Euclide: "Preservation Paradox"

San Francisco: Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Preservation Paradox, a solo show of new sculpture, painting, and relief work by Gregory Euclide. Utilizing natural materials and organic compositions, the exhibition examines the ways in which western culture preserves specific aspects of nature while simultaneously destroying others.

Following a recent exhibition at the Palo Alto Arts Center, Euclide utilizes his signature assemblage and relief-style sculpture to tell the story of the Preservation Paradox. His newest series of works, titled Scrapes, are masterfully rendered yet magically abstracted landscape paintings which investigate the environmental cost of art materials.

Says Euclide of the series, ‘Acrylic paint, a petroleum product, is used to generate the illusion of land or water when in a pile or scraped across the surface, as well as thinned out and used to generate the illusion of landscape.’ The Scrape series is a study not only of landscape painting, but of paint itself. Thick swaths of acrylic paint serve as both figure and ground, revealing the material’s unpredictable nature as well as its ability to be manipulated into representations of nature.

In this way, Euclide asks the viewer to contemplate their relationship with nature the irony of landscape painting, a tradition embedded in materials which are intrusive and destructive to the land. ‘I feel much of landscape painting is a means of attempting to preserve some beauty—in this instance, in order to preserve one part of nature we destroy another.’

Please join us for Preservation Paradox, opening Saturday, September 8 with an evening reception from 6pm - 9pm, where the artist will be in attendance. The exhibition will be on view through Saturday, September 29.