Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present,  Slow Wave, a solo exhibition by Paul Wackers. The exhibit spans two spaces at 1275 Minnesota Street.

Slow Wave is a new series of works continuing and expanding Wackers’ investigations in painting and ceramics. Using his everyday surroundings at home and his studio as source material, his painting can largely be considered still life. However, Wackers also fills his painting with objects from his imagination. He frequently adds gestures that can be read as a moment of harnessed energy, a movement, that in life would be a sensation, but in a painting is manifested as a stroke of paint. 

The manner in which Wackers uses objects from his studio and everyday life as sources for his paintings and ceramics can be described as a measure of the human inclination to collect and exhibit objects. Similarly, the varied density and sparseness in his paintings can be interpreted as an amount of time being referenced. The sparse paintings are slow paintings, whereas the dense paintings are akin to labyrinthine puzzles with a lot of information, human experiences, and memories.  

Thematically, he references moments, motifs, and patterns encountered during his recent travels in Europe and North Africa. Edges of rugs, patterns that mimic stone walls, foliage and landscapes seen through windows echo recent experiences, a vivid and abstracted travelogue. 

The exhibition also includes ceramics that are displayed on painted wooden shelves. His ceramic work is an extension of his continued interest in hand-built objects.    

About the Artist 
Paul Wackers was born New Haven, Connecticut in 1978. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and  BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. Some of Paul’s solo exhibitions include Narwhal Projects (Toronto, ON), Alice Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), Eleanor Harwood Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY). Paul has also been in several group and two-person shows, including exhibitions at New Image Art (Los Angeles, CA), Halsey McKay (East Hampton, NY), Frosch and Portmann (New York, NY), and Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA). His work is in the MIMA Museum (Brussels, BE) and many prominent private and public collections, including Chevron Corporation, Fidelity Investments and the Ellie Mae Corporate Collection. He also installed a large public mural on the James Hotel in New York City. 

He received the Tournesol Painting Prize in 2008 with an awarded residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County, CA), the NKDale Residency (Sunfjord, Norway), Encore (Brussels, BE), and an artist residency at the Byrdcliffe Colony (Woodstock, NY), and the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, (Portland, ME).