Across Continents and Mediums | Curated Virtual Exhibition
Serge Sorokko Gallery
26 days left
The Serge Sorokko Gallery is excited to present to you our latest exhibition, Across Continents and Mediums, an exclusive selection of outstanding paintings and sculptures that will go on view in our new Napa location later this spring.
Across Continents and Mediums, a large-scale inaugural installation, will feature some of the best works by Roger-Edgar Gillet, Hunt Slonem, Donald Sultan, Leonard Baskin, Yuri Kuper, Miguel Condé, as well as other gallery artists and will highlight a diverse and dynamic range of their artistic expression.
We are also thrilled to highlight the artwork of Roger-Edgar Gillet (1924-2004), the renowned French Figurative Expressionist. Just in the past few years, prestigious institutions—such as the Musée National d'Art Moderne at Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—have acquired Gillet's work. His artistry has also been widely celebrated in recent exhibitions at various museums across Europe.
Having identified Mr. Gillet's enormous talent early on, when the Sorokko Gallery debuted his paintings in San Francisco in 1987, we are delighted to see the visionary artist's work commended today as ahead of its time.
Roger-Edgar Gillet: Paintings
Roger Edgar Gillet (1924–2004) was a celebrated French artist whose career evolved from European Lyrical Abstraction to Figurative Expressionist painting in the 1960s.
A painter of the Seconde École de Paris and the Art Informel movement, Gillet was initially known for his abstract works featuring thick, textured impasto.
His artistic trajectory shifted dramatically after a 1955 trip to New York, where El Greco’s Portrait of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara inspired him to embrace figuration, crafting a unique style of distorted, grotesque human figures in earthy tones. Through series like Les Juges and Les Musiciens, Gillet explored profound human themes with a visceral intensity, drawing parallels to Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet.
His works, celebrated for bridging abstraction and figuration, reside in major museum collections globally, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Hunt Slonem
Monumental Paintings and Portraits
Butterflies & Guardians Weds Jeffrey (2020), Oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in (182.9 x 243.8 cm)
Moluccans (Cockatoos) (2020), Oil on canvas, 72 x 84 in (182.9 x 213.4 cm)
Hutch Revisited (2018), Oil on canvas, 72 x 84 in (182.9 x 213.4 cm)
Hunt Slonem's Portraits
“I repeat subjects that mean a lot to me, like repeating a divine name or mantra.”
—Hunt Slonem
Slonem portrait wall (artworks scaled to relative dimensions)
Donald Sultan
Black Tar Paintings and Poppy Drawings
(Not scaled to relative dimensions)
"Donald Sultan is descended from the Process artists of the late 1960's in that he makes art out of materials that are very much a part of contemporary life. Yet even as his coeval, Julian Schnabel, has cornered plates as a medium, Sultan seems to have been the first to work in tar, combining it with spackle and latex on a ground consisting of vinyl tiles attached to Masonite."
—Vivien Raynor, The New York Times
Donald Sultan's Iconic Poppies
"The poppy that I work with came from the poppy pins you put in your lapel on Veterans Day. I was living in France when I first started using it, and the French poppy pins are a very plasticy red with a black center, and we have the crêpe-shaped ones.
There were several reasons I was interested in them. First of all, poppies being opiates—just remember in The Wizard of Oz, you can see what happens. Second, it’s a play on the word “pop.” And it’s also from the field of Flanders, remembering the World War I massacres there. That’s where the idea came from."
—Donald Sultan
Yuri Kuper
Mixed Media Paintings
(Not scaled to relative dimensions)
“The quiet paintings of Yuri Kuper require time to see and experience. Their calm presence gives today's spectators – constantly assailed by the culture of media soundbites – a profound sense of release. Yet at the same time, they lead us on a voyage of exploration. Kuper's quiet images scrutinize and reveal the ordinary phenomena of our lives, enfolding everyday objects in a poetic meditation."
— Peter Selz, Art historian, museum director, and curator
Miguel Condé
Pen & Ink Line Drawings
"My favorite artists are artists whose names no one knows... You know, nobody knows the names of the first artists, the artists of Lascaux or Altamira."
—Miguel Condé
(Not scaled to relative dimensions)
Leonard Baskin
Bronze Sculptures
"Baskin gives his figures all the unadorned monumentality he can, tries to capture the most elemental aspects of man’s life. Like the sculptured gods of Egypt and Sumeria, his figures are still, withdrawn, awesome. Yet they also express a sharply contrasting sense of the ordinary and everyday. He casts fat, simple, dull-seeming people in the roles of gods and heroes. Except for his owl, and the timelessness it symbolizes, the Seated Man might be riding a subway."
—Time Magazine
(Not scaled to relative dimensions)
Francesco Clemente
Victory
"Clemente proceeds in his picture-making as if lisping, speaking with a timid, secret and confidential manner, and thus far has managed to sidestep pigeonholing analyses. Clemente’s art is elusive. One chases it. He teases you into going after it. You want to catch it, but not pin it down.
His posturings of permissive messiness are protective clutters against the 'vanguard' mania for novelty, for newness, which pressures artists to produce an art which appears non-derivative."
—Edit deAk, ArtForum
Victory (2015-2016), Mixed media on canvas, 91 x 112 3/8 in (231.1 x 285.5 cm)
