September 11, 2002

WHILE ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY blankets the land like a San Francisco summer fog, Bay Area gallery owners still have dreams of bigger and better spaces and locations, ambitions aided by the plummeting cost of commercial real estate. A handful of galleries have used the summer to create, move, and/or remodel their spaces. In the venerable 49 Geary building, Catherine Clark Gallery has enlarged a second time, expanding exhibition space – which now features a show by Inez Storer – and adding a video room inaugurated last week with projected works by Larry Jordan. Also at 49 Geary now is Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery. After getting its bearings for a couple of years in downtown Oakland, the youthfully spirited gallery has made the leap to San Francisco. Gallery owner Oliveria is hoping for more visibility and just might get it with a reopening show (Oct. 1) of work by Clare Rojas, a recent transplant from Philadelphia and a peer of many of the better-known Mission District artists.

Linc Real Art only moved a few blocks but is a heck of a lot more visible on Market Street, just behind Zuni, in a space long home to cactus emporium Red Desert. The opening group show there, cleverly titled "Nest Egg Omelette," runs through Oct. 15. The more uptown Michael Martin Galleries has moved from Union Square to uncharted art territory in the shadow of Pac Bell Park, an area where business space is a plentiful commodity. With a good deal on rent, this space is planning to go nonprofit and give proceeds from art sales to needy art causes. The gallery is set to open sometime this month with a group show.

More surprising is the appearance of Peres Projects, a small but ambitious space in a loft building at 17th and Bryant. Run by Javier Peres, a still-young former attorney and current art collector, the space plans on providing a venue for artists who wouldn't otherwise be seen in S.F. Peres's splashy, sexy fall offering is a show of often raunchy but always artful photos and films by queer Canadian artist-pornographer Bruce La Bruce, which opens Sept. 27. No one else around here has dared to show these picks of randy boys and pregnant Asia Argento puffing on a cig.

Other fall highlights: "Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting" is poised to be the kind of success it was in New York this spring when it opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Oct. 12, while things get more new-media Dec. 4 with "No Ghost, Just a Shell: The Ann Lee Project," in which French artists Pierre Huyghe and Phillippe Parreno put to conceptual cinematic use a manga character they licensed from a Japanese studio. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor goes for a '70s revival with Philip Guston's "Poor Richard," the late artist's satirical phallic cartoons of Richard Nixon, which runs Oct. 12 through Jan. 26.

Hot contemporary curators will be getting some play on the art school circuit. Matthew Higgs, the British expat who is the new curator of art and design at California College of Arts and Crafts' Logan Galleries, debuted with "To Whom It May Concern," a group show of artists working with missives (through Oct. 26). At the San Francisco Art Institute, Nicholas Borriauad, the curator of the massive new Palais de Tokyo in Paris, has put together the hands-on "Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now," running from Oct. 18 through Dec. 14.

And wry Viennese performance prankster Erwin Wurm presents recent works at Jack Hanley Gallery starting Oct. 17, while Los Angeles-based Daniel Martinez shows his iconoclastic takes on self and social identity – including an unnerving animatronic self-portrait and visceral use of movie makeup at SF Camerawork Oct. 29 through Nov. 30.

On the other side of the coin, word has it that Quotidian Gallery, a downtown venue committed to new work by younger Bay Area artists, is closing this fall after shows by Arnold J. Kemp (through Oct. 19), Alice Shaw, and a bang of a final group project called "Bloodshow." "After that," gallery director Jason Leggiere says, "we may go into a cocoon and emerge as something else." Sounds promising.

G.H.