The gallery’s Art Basel presentation highlights the work of women artists and post-World War II abstraction. Over the past several years, women artists have broken sales records and achieved scholarly and institutional recognition for their role in Abstract Expressionism. Early paintings by Pat Passlof (1928–2011) were recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her 12-foot wide 1961-62 painting Atheneum will be on view. Atheneum is an example of what the writer David Jacobsen Loncle termed Passlof’s “garden of paint,” with yellows, greens, and purples creating dynamic rhythms across the surface. Passlof’s process, which involved a meditative relationship to the paint and a simultaneous release of agency, is foregrounded in the painting’s title. Elise Asher (1912–2004) was a painter and poet whose integration of poetry into her works represents a significant contribution to New York School painting. Asher’s work of the early 1950s utilizes expressive, energetic linear brushwork; by 1961, Asher introduced text from her own poetry into these masses—creating atmospheric clouds of color which blur the line between brushwork and writing. Susan Fortgang (b. 1944) creates paintings with a physical presence, using thick layers of paint to form textured surfaces. In the 1970s, Fortgang began using acrylic paint, creating work that looks like weavings. Drawing from her earliest experiences of making with knitting, crochet, and Bargello, Fortgang created hard-edge lines in the structure of a grid that refer both to painting’s history and that of textiles.

The contemporary artists on view include Lauren dela Roche, Huê Thi Hoffmaster (b. 1982), Christabel MacGreevy (b. 1991), Seffa Klein, and Cato. Lauren dela Roche (b. 1983), who is currently an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, makes richly layered figurative paintings on found and repurposed cotton feedsacks, referencing image sources including zines, European modernisms, and autobiography. A nude woman, multiplied and echoed throughout, appears in dream-like environments of ancient Greek archways, Matissean-patterned wall tapestries, and amongst larger-than-life butterflies, snakes, and swans. Dela Roche, who considers eco-theory and ideas about re-wilding, sees her as a symbol of Mother Nature. Similarly, the flower forms in Huê Thi Hoffmaster’s calligraphic thickets of paint are stand-ins for figuration and states of mind. His work oscillates between Eastern and Western painting traditions. Recent paintings utilize a black ground; the artist considers bits of light streaming through a forest canopy as a metaphor for glimmers of human attention and nurturing. Christabel MacGreevy’s painted ceramic works subversively explore the performance of gender identity, personal and pagan mythology. MacGreevy envisions the figures on her vessels living out their lives with an expression of freedom, fluidity, and nonconformity. Seffa Klein (b. 1996) is a French-American artist whose work is grounded in the intersection of science, aesthetics, and meditation. She paints in acrylic on heat-resistant woven glass canvas and applies a plaster bas-relief, forming a skeletal structure, before gilding the surface with molten bismuth metal. Cato (b. 1999) is a multi-media British artist who works with painted and collaged canvas forms to express the energy of the city, Black culture, and relationships between people: musicians, couples, and friends. He mines a multitude of visual sources for his paintings: historical archives, art history, and his own polaroids, creating a deliberate disjuncture between the photorealist style of the faces, and the loose geometric style of the rest of the paintings.

Humanist and activist concerns characterize the figurative painting of Marie Johnson-Calloway and Martha Edelheit. The work of Martha Edelheit (b. 1931) from the past sixty years is transgressive, whimsical, and sensuous all at once. It reflects her abiding love of art history and her reimagining of the discipline that was largely created by men, for men. Marie Johnson-Calloway (1920–2018) was a trailblazing artist of the Bay Area who is known for her mixed-media cutouts and assemblage works that honor joy and Black family life in her community. On view will be the artist's iconic and striking painted construction, School Crossing Guard, 1985, last seen in the museum surveys Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2020.