Friday, April 2, 2010

Friday Gallery Walk

social commentary

Just a quick run-down of a few galleries we saw this evening:

F*cal Face Dot Gallery
Marco Zamora & Derek Aalbeck - Extremely small gallery (one room, about the size of a master bedroom) but bold art. Incredibly rendered graphite drawings by Derek Albeck and interesting ink & watercolor paintings on wood by Marco Zamora.

Octavia's Haze
Expressionist paintings by James Michalopoulos - Had trouble finding this gallery (the gallery web site says it's located at 370 Hayes - it's actually a block away from there) and when we did finally locate it, it was closed. Even though we were there an hour before the stated closing time. Too bad, I really wanted to see James Michalopoulos' paintings.

So we checked out another gallery instead - Polanco Gallery at 393 Hayes. They had a terrific group show of Mexican artists - the best show of the evening, really. Unfortunately, they don't allow photos in the gallery, which is really too bad since the images on their web site don't do justice to the work. The work was arranged exceptionally well and paintings by Rafael Rodriquez and Carlos Jaurena were top quality. There was also a great little piece by Abel Almenara that is not even on the web site.

94xxxx5 photo show

Rare Device is one of those small gallery & craft places that seem to be proliferating these days. Theoretically, sales of the small craft items support the fine art exhibition space, but I've heard from some of the folks in these spaces that actually the economic downturn has hurt small craft sales more than fine art. "94xxxx5" is a photo show in a tiny back room at Rare Device - the work focuses on SF neighborhoods and fits well with the rest of the items in the space.

Along the way, we passed some outdoor art on Octavia:

"Ecstasy" on Octavia

1 comment:

Nancy Ewart said...

I had a great time - but those photos of me. Oy! I sure look like I'm holding forth ! I hope that you all got home safely. It looks like the rain died down but it sure got cold. Anyway, the art was so-so but the company was great.