September 3 - October 7, 2023

Reception for the artists: Thursday September 11, 5:30-7:30pm

Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the Fall 2014 Season:  a two person show of paintings by Dean Smith presented with new ceramic sculptures by Annabeth Rosen.  Each artist’s body of work would in its own right make a beautiful presentation.  Together, they create an engaging dialogue about the hand of the artist and materiality.

The paintings by Dean Smith comprise a unique body of work made in the 1990’s.  Ranging from small canvases to larger paintings (60” x 50”), all feature Smith’s unique technique of oil and wax that interweaves the two media in an entrancing marbled effect.  The small table-top sculptures of Annabeth Rosen are elaborate mounds of clay, glaze and salt, fired in a ‘salt flux’ technique triggering a self-glazing ceramic.  In her own innovation, Rosen mixes chemistry and clay into one form, allowing heat, salt and chemical interaction to bring the glaze to the surface.

In the artworks featured, both artists begin with materials that, in their raw state, are liquid or malleable.  The finished pieces become conscious explorations of the artists’ chosen materials-- arresting time as the oil and wax (in Smith’s paintings) and clay and glaze (in Rosen’s sculptures) arrest time with both the sense of pleasure and anxiety.  

Dean Smith’s paintings, while innovative and unexpected, work within a traditional concept of painting, applying liquid media and pigment onto the stretched support of a canvas.  Similarly,  Annabeth Rosen in her new works begins with the tenets of ceramic, working soft clay into  a shape that obeys its own weight and gravity’s pull.  Both practices overtly employ the materiality and visceral appearance of paint and clay;  and both result in abstract imagery inherent to the nature of the media — organic patterns and matrices, or lava-like clumps and molten streams.

When Dean Smith began making his oil and wax paintings twenty years ago, he was experimenting in a process that matched the artist’s control against a process that risks his careful preparation in a final step, heating the layered surface so that the different materials interact.  Paint strands became magically suspended one inside the other, creating sinewy membranes of color and translucent media.  The organic patterns and matrices of colors interweaving and breaking up remind the viewer of surfaces seen in biology, in both plant and animal tissue.

Annabeth Rosen’s new sculptures take on fundamental principles of ceramics, addressing the rawest elements of its magic and ‘alchemy’:  moving clay and minerals into shapes and heating the forms to transform into objects with a shiny crust. Her forms speak to geology and the crudest of earth forms: mounds, rocks, volcanoes, stalagmites.  

About the Artists:

Annabeth Rosen is a Professor of Art At UC Davis, holding the Robert Arneson Endowed chair since 1997.  She studied at Alfred University and the Cranbrook Academy of Art before teaching posts at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Art institute of Chicago.  Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally. 

Dean Smith received his B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from UC Berkeley and has exhibited his paintings, drawings, and films internationally.  His works are in numerous public collections:  The British Museum, London; Hammer Museum and LACMA, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Gallery, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Berkeley Art Museum, California.

For further information about the exhibition and the artists, please telephone 415.433.2710