Chromotherapy

Mike Henderson is known for his abstract, highly gestural oil paintings that demonstrate a palpable connection to postwar abstraction and a defining instinct for improvisation. Henderson applies thick layers of paint to produce deeply textured, three dimensional surfaces, with paint scraped off in some areas to reveal under-layers of color and texture. In As It Is Now (2017), bright jolts of neon and primary color peek from beneath dense, vertical striations of brown across the canvas. Contrasting hues, textures, and patterns come together in an irregular grid, like the syncopated beat of a song, to form a harmonious whole.

Andy Goldsworthy draws from the environment, both natural and built, to create extraordinary works that are often ephemeral in nature. Red river rock (2016), filmed on the artist’s property in rural Scotland, sees the artist transforming first the smooth surface of a river rock and then the flowing river itself with iron oxide-red dust from a ground-down stone. The work unfolds gracefully over time, as the river eventually runs clean. This vivid red is derived from iron content in the earth, a pigment the artist has found in every country where he has worked. “The reason that our blood is red is because of its iron content, so we share a connection with our stone,” Goldsworthy further explains. “When I find it in Australia, or Japan, or France, I feel like I’m tapping into the same vein.”

Won Ju Lim’s research-driven practice draws from sources that include architecture and film, inviting audiences to reconsider the built environment and its relation to memory, fantasy and longing. Her Kiss works produce colorful cascades of geometrical shadows when light passes through them. The Plexiglas components within each wall-hung sculpture are architectural models based on plans of the famed Case Study Houses — quintessential examples of mid-century modernism built in the Los Angeles area between 1948 and 1966. Immaterial and intangible, their colorful interiors become reference points for an architecture of the ideal.

Over a career spanning seven decades, Bay Area painter David Simpson weaves together impulses of minimalism with a keen understanding of perceptual phenomena, to forge an entirely singular creative vision. Imperative from the Ideal (1989) is one of several large-scale, richly colored tondos paintings (so named for their distinctive shape) that Simpson created in the 1980s. Divided into perfect halves — one of remarkable depth and the other appearing to radiate with interior light — Imperative of the Ideal sees Simpson increasingly exploring the radical possibilities of reductive, abstract painting.