Group Exhibition
Curated by Eric Butcher

December 17, 2025, to January 31, 2026

Exhibition Reception
5 pm to 7 pm
Saturday, January 10

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled Obsessive | Compulsive on view from December 17, 2025, to January 31, 2026, curated by Eric Butcher with works by Larry Bell, Lucinda Burgess, Eric Butcher, Morrissey & Hancock, Andy Harper, Sam Hodge, Barbara Nicholas, Matthew Picton, Diogo Pimentão, Gregg Renfrow, Giulia Ricci, Michael Russell, Carole Silverstein, and Suzan Woodruff.

The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

Join us for the exhibition reception at the gallery on Saturday, January 10, from 4pm to 6pm. This event is free and open to the public.


Obsessive | Compulsive, curated by UK-based artist Eric Butcher at Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco, is an exhibition of works which are clearly and visibly a result of the processes of their creation. A preoccupation with systems, procedures, and processes allows each of the artists to end up in a place unplanned and unimagined. They share a preoccupation with the materiality of their medium, a delight in the physical properties of the material, and the dialogue between chance and control.

Eric Butcher

"The show comprises six US artists and eight UK artists," says artist and curator Eric Butcher. "As part of my commitment to sustainability, the UK artists were asked to submit unframed works on paper or unstretched canvas, which were rolled-up together in two cardboard tubes. Lightweight and highly compact, the carbon cost of shipping was minimized, while the inclusion of the US artists means the show has a wider range of physical manifestations and isn't just a show of unframed works on paper."

Larry Bell (born 1939), based in Taos, New Mexico, and Venice, California, is a leading figure of the California Light and Space movement. Bell’s AAAAA 57 (2007) is a mixed media collage from his Vapor Drawings body of work and forms part of the broader AAAAA series.

Lucinda Burgess is a British artist living and working in the UK, known for her conceptual drawing and installation. Burgess’s primary focus is on materiality--she is particularly drawn to its natural, often delicate and always changeable character. Materials are presented in their manufactured but unadorned state--minimally and simply.

UK-based artist Eric Butcher creates work by destroying his own paintings, peeling the paint from its original support and reconfiguring it between sheets of glass or on paper, producing a “natural history” of his past creative endeavors. Driven by environmental and existential concerns, he works exclusively with materials already in his studio, repurposing and recycling without consuming more, and will cease making art once all available materials are used. 

Morrissey and Hancock (Patrick Morrissey, Hanz Hancock), based in the UK, have evolved a close working relationship over the last twenty or so years, focussing increasingly on the idea of a "third voice" whereby they shelve ego in the production of their creative output. 

Rendered with extreme detail and a charged sense of both reality and fantasy, Andy Harper’s paintings operate as arenas of discovery, where flashes of light, vegetal forms, human anatomy, and ivory-toned bone evoke the exuberance of growth alongside its inevitable counterpart--decay. 

The Unfolding series began around five years ago, when Sam Hodge started making her own pigments and collecting unfolded cardboard boxes, combining these practices into an ongoing body of prints shaped by the variety of box forms and natural ochre colors. 

Known for her monumental watercolors, London-based Barbara Nicholls manipulates pigment in increasingly large volumes of water, extending a wider practice that has involved stitching, drawing, cutting, and extracting materials from archaeological, architectural, and geological sites. 

Inspired by Federico Fellini’s film Roma, Matthew Picton’s Roma #2 presents the city as a layered protagonist, weaving together myth, history, and cinematic memory, from the founding legend of Romulus and Remus to the buried frescoes revealed during modern subway construction. 

Diogo Pimentão (born Lisbon, 1973) lives and works in London and is known for experimental, drawing-based works that blur the boundaries between drawing and sculpture through an intensive engagement with materiality. 

Gregg Renfrow, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, works on acrylic panels that allow light to filter through the pigment. The result is an illumination of color and form subtly projected from the surface of the work. While looking at this painting, the bands of color may appear suspended in real time and space. 

Untitled Painting is a series of acrylic works on canvas in which Giulia Ricci brings the flat, repeated structures of her drawings into dialogue with the material and physical presence of painting, deliberately referencing textile artefacts such as banners and wall hangings rather than traditional stretched canvases. 

Los Angeles-based artist Michael Russell explores the passage of time through drawing, using linear, repetitive mark-making as a record of duration and an invitation to introspection for both artist and viewer. 

Carole Silverstein’s the thread of longing & repair centers on a recurring cosmic web motif drawn from sacred geometry, extending her long-standing garden imagery as a metaphor for healing, rupture, and renewal. Guided by the Buddhist and Hindu concept of Indra’s Net—an infinitely interdependent universe—and the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or repairing a broken world, her paintings and watercolors explore re-weaving wholeness on both personal and collective levels. 

With a method of controlled chaos, Los Angeles-based Suzan Woodruff paints works that depict natural occurrences, from the molecular to interstellar phenomena. Using gravity, pigment, viscosity and evaporation, she re-creates nature within her ethereal acrylic color explorations.