On view July 26 – September 27, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, July 26 from 3 – 5 pm; remarks at 3:45 pm

Gil Batle’s Almost Sanctuary is the artist’s debut exhibition in the gallery’s main space, following several presentations in EXiT, the gallery’s art book store. Born in 1962 in San Francisco to Filipino parents, Batle spent 20 years in and out of five different California prisons for fraud and forgery. He now lives on a small island in the Philippines. Batle’s self-taught drawing ability evolved behind bars into sophisticated and clandestine tattooing skills that protected him from murderous gang violence in prisons such as San Quentin, Chuckawalla, and Jamestown—the “Gladiator School” as it’s known to the unfortunate cognoscenti. In racially segregated cell blocks, where Bloods, Crips, and Aryan Brotherhood gang members rule with intimidation and threat, Batle’s facility for drawing was considered magic by the murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers whose stories he now recounts in minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich eggshells, clay, and paper.

Batle writes, “My work depicts surreal visions of memories from my struggles with incarceration and/or my struggle for freedom. There are many symbols of shanks, chains, barbed wire, locks, birds, and inmates linked together in chains surrounding panels of dreams, events I recall, or the inmates I’ve known.”

“I actually have to go back (mentally) to prison to capture that feel of being inside that place,” the artist states. “It’s a relief of gratitude when I look up from the egg and I’m reminded that I’m not in there anymore.” While articles about prison abuse appear weekly in the press, they are mere snapshots of the hard truth chronicled in Batle’s artwork. The violent men he knew, the sad mistakes that sometimes led to the incarceration of regular guys, the terrifying events he witnessed, and the bonds formed under the worst conditions all appear with precise detail within his artwork.