SF Art Events: Week of 10.05.25
THING ONE: Ann Gale
Ongoing - November 1, 2025
Ann Gale, Zeke in a Wing Chair
Dolby Chadwick Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Ann Gale, on view during the month of October. Gale paints her human subjects not as fixed entities, but as sites of ongoing experience. Her canvases gather time, compressing shifts in light, posture, and perspective into portraits set in motion. Each painting is a study in simultaneity, where the body is both precisely rendered and dissolved in time.
The artist’s relationship to her subjects is sustained and deeply felt. She returns to the same people over years, allowing the arc of their lives to unfold in paint. These are not fleeting encounters but evolving collaborations. “There is always something that makes me want to paint someone again,” she observes. What compels her is a sense of both presence and the human condition: our fragility, our strength, and the quiet resilience of living in a body, alone and separate from each other.
Gale’s distinctive style—patches of paint of varying size, shifting chromatic fields, and planes of light—does not obscure her sitters but reveals them more fully. Faces are rendered in greater detail, but even here, the eyes often evade us. They blur or disappear, as if resisting the finality of being known. Movement and time enter the frame: a head tilts, an arm twists, light changes. Gale holds onto each of these moments without covering them up or resolving them as she negotiates between the optical and the emotional.
Figures in her paintings are shaped as much by what surrounds them as by their internal state, with the physical environment becoming a stand-in for the emotional one. “A figure in a painting is absorbed by things around them, eaten up and carved around,” she says. The background becomes a kind of echo chamber for the body’s solitude and inner life. This sensitivity to atmosphere extends to Gale’s self-portraits, in which she situates herself amid abstract marks and shifting space. There is no firm boundary between self and surroundings, no hard line separating feeling from observation.
Ultimately, Gale’s work offers a profound meditation on what it means to see and be seen. Her paintings ask us to meet her subjects not with certainty, but with attention. To witness their presence the way she does: slowly, physically, and with care.
Ann Gale was born in 1966 and earned her BFA from Rhode Island College and MFA from Yale University. In addition to exhibiting across North America, Gale is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, a Washington Arts Council Fellowship in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1996, among others. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Academy of Art and Design, New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon; and the Tucson Museum of Art. This is her fourth solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.
LOCATION: Dolby Chadwick, 210 Post Street, Suite 205, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday–Friday 9 am –6 pm and Saturday 11 am –5 pm
THINGS THREE: Daido Moriyama: Dog and Man
20 SEPTEMBER - 1 NOVEMBER 2025
Organized by Maya Ishiwata
Courtesy of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Casemore Gallery presents Dog and Man, a new exhibition of iconic and more recent images by legendary Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido. This exhibition focuses the city of Tokyo as seen through the constantly sprinting Moriyama’s lens in his latest color and black-and-white works, in addition to some of his iconic images from the 60s and 70s.
Known as a master of snapshots, Moriyama Daido, one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, began his career in the 1960s, and achieved initial notoriety as one of the members of Provoke photomagazine. Their style, which came to be described as “are, bure, boke” (rough, blurry, out of focus), sent shockwaves through the photography world and created nothing less than a new lingua franca of photography, with its grainy, high-contrast, kinetically composed snapshots of a post-war Japan rapidly transforming itself. Moriyama described their work in simple terms—“Japan was moving fast, and we wanted to reflect that in our work.”
Dog and Man presents a selection of Moriyama’s early Provoke-era pictures. They depict Tokyo’s bustling and gritty streets and alleys, women’s legs in fishnet tights photographed in closeups that approach abstraction, and people young and old adapting in the aftermath of a war that irrecoverably opened and changed their society in ways shocking and thrilling. Centering the show is a mural-size gelatin silver print of what is perhaps Moriyama’s most famous and enigmatic image, “Stray Dog,”
In the decades following his early notoriety, Moriyama has never stopped working, never stopped exploring and pushing boundaries of what the camera can show and say, and never stopped documenting his restless journey in envelope-pushing photobooks. The more recent images are represented in the show in black-and-white gelatin silver prints and rarely seen color pigment prints. They reflect Tokyo as an ever-alluring subject for Moriyama, a city where history and modernity both collide and coexist in ceaseless transformation.
Taken together, the fullness of these works show a revolutionary photographer who became a master photographer, still stirred by a city that fuels his revolutionary spirit as he continues his effort to reach, in his words, “the end of photography.”
LOCATION: Casemore Gallery, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday / 11am - 6pm
Thing two: Friends & Family, a group exhibition
ONGOING - October 25, 2025
Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Friends & Family, a group exhibition featuring new works by artists in our community.
Exhibiting Artists:
Erin Armstrong | Lou Benesch | Camila Buxeda | Jeff Canham | Gina M. Contreras | Anjelica Colliard | Kyle Daniels | Thomas Danthony | James Eddy | Austin Elfio Montanari | Mary Finlayson | Casey Gray | Gabriel Isaac Kasor | Rachel Kaye | Gabe Langholtz | Madi | Christopher Martin | Megan Ellen MacDonald | Alan Miknis | Robert Minervini | Sofia Pashaei | Elena Redmond | Alexander Rohrig | AP Shrewsbury | Lucy Stark | Rachel Strum | Sara Suppan | Anastasia Tumanova | Ester Tuva | Cha Yuree | Alex Ziv
Opening Night Reception:
Saturday, October 4th
5pm - 7pm
Some of the artists will be in attendance
LOCATION: Hashimoto Contemporary SF, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday / 11am - 6pm
Gabriel Isaac Kasor
ducking family time, 2025
oil paint, pigment stick
40 x 40 in
