*Opening reception Nov. 5th 4pm - 7pm

The San Francisco Arts Education Project presents a solo exhibition by SFArtsED Artist Mentor Renée Gertler, whose drawings and sculptures are informed by two realms most people would consider diametric opposites: science and the transcendental.

Artist statement:
It began around the dinner table during my youth, when conversations with my father, a neurologist, and my mother, a paranormalist, vacillated between his vocation—strokes, gray matter—and her avocation—palm readings, exorcisms, stone gatherings. On weekends I’d join her in her quest for new and different types of knowledge, and our journeys took us all over Southern California. I acquired in these formative years quite a broad acceptance of the validity of individual experience. When my mother brought up her ghost encounters, it struck me that they were entirely real to her—certainly far more real than the abstraction of dementia.

Today my drawings engage with concepts, memories, and sensibilities regarding logic and intuition, as expressed through number patterns, colored pencils, and architectural drawing skills gained through my studies. The drawings use an optimistic pastel and technicolor palette popular to the cultural landscape of the 1990s. 

My sculptures employ papier-mâché, minerals, crystals, beadwork,  textile techniques that I learned from my mother. She grew up in the Netherlands and went to a finishing school where she learned embroidery, sewing, and other modes of handwork. I regard the sculptures as feminine abstractions; their forms reference the feminine, but in an enigmatic way. The particular blue I employ is associated with mystical ideas, but it doesn’t show up in nature at all—it was developed in a lab—and I am interested in the paradox inherent in how this color bridges the gap between mysticism and science.

The catalyzing energy of Ruth Asawa, who started the Alvarado School Art Workshop (which later evolved into the San Francisco Arts Education Project), is a huge inspiration to me in my studio practice and my family life. Asawa was a mother to six children but maintained a rigorous studio  practice. When I worked as an Artist Mentor with SFArtsED, the open attitude of bringing contemporary art to students in public schools was imbued with spontaneity that I attribute to Asawa.

SFArtsED