Julian Lethbridge British, b. 1947

Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Works in Black & White, a group exhibition that delves into the world of black and white as the primary, and often sole, colors. This curated collection explores the nuances of these two fundamental tones, reflecting on the various ways artists employ simplicity and complexity within this timeless palette. From bold abstractions to intricate minimalism, the exhibition reveals the artists' diverse abilities to convey emotion and provoke contemplation within the grayscale spectrum.

Works in Black & White will be on display from September 14 — October 13, 2023, featured on the top level of Berggruen Gallery.

Exhibiting Artists:

Robert Bechtle | Richard Diebenkorn | Lucian Freud | Michael Gregory | Philip Guston | Mona Hatoum | Al Held | Sarah Hotchkiss | William Kentridge | Anselm Kiefer | Matt Kleberg | Des Lawrence | Julian Lethbridge | Brice Marden | Sam Messenger | Martin Puryear | Linda Ridgway | Iran Do Espírito Santo | Richard Serra | Joel Shapiro | Kiki Smith | Jonas Wood

I am honored to present this exhibition, Her Voice, in honor of my late wife, Gretchen Berggruen. Co-owner of Berggruen Gallery, Gretchen was the heart and soul of the gallery. This group show features more than thirty artists, all of whom Gretchen championed, worked closely alongside, and deeply admired. This exhibition reflects Gretchen’s vision and her great passion in life. Those who had the pleasure to have known her know the deep level of care and attention with which she always acted. Her expertise, drive, kindness, patience, and perseverance drove the gallery to be what it is today. Gretchen was my partner and our leader, and I am proud to present Her Voice, celebrating her life and all that she built. – John Berggruen

Featuring artworks by the following artists:

Diana Al-Hadid | John Alexander | Jennifer Bartlett | Cecily Brown | Christopher Brown | Squeak Carnwath | Bruce Cohen | Roseline Delisle | Mark di Suvero | Richard Diebenkorn | Austin Eddy | Helen Frankenthaler | Jane Hammond | Stephen Hannock | Shara Hughes | William Kentridge | Clare Kirkconnell | Julian Lethbridge | Alicia McCarthy | Tom McKinley | Julie Mehretu | Elizabeth Murray | Tom Otterness | Martin Puryear | Linda Ridgway | Joel Shapiro | Judith Shea | Kiki Smith | Mark Tansey | Wayne Thiebaud | Fiona Waterstreet

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Summer Group Show. This exhibition presents a curated selection of historical and contemporary works in conversation, creating an interplay of color with intricate unions of form, texture, and movement. In Summer Group Show, the gallery is excited to highlight work by artists with both new connections, and long-standing relationships with the gallery. The exhibition illuminates original perspective and vibrancy and breathes freshness into the season and months ahead. Summer Group Show will be on view at Berggruen Gallery from June 9 through July 23, 2022. The exhibition features work by:

Polly Apfelbaum | Richard Diebenkorn | Austin Eddy | Günther Förg | Mark Fox | Matthew Feyld
Alexander Gorlizki | Al Held | Sarah Hotchkiss | Ellsworth Kelly | Matt Kleberg
Paul Kremer | Anna Kunz | Julian Lethbridge | Sol LeWitt | Alicia McCarthy
Beatriz Milhazes | JJ Miyaoka-Pakola | Sarah Morris | Margaux Ogden | Brent Wadden | Lucy Williams

Summer Group Show opens June 9, 2022. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre, a two-person exhibition featuring recent work by both artists. The show will be on view at Berggruen Gallery, East Hampton from July 9 through August 8, 2021.

Julian Lethbridge’s paintings expand his exploration into the medium’s limits of hue, pattern, and tactility. The artist begins by creating a grid for his canvases—a preliminary guide that informs the initial composition. Lethbridge moves on to build layer upon layer of oil paint, often emphasizing his undulating patterns with pigment sticks. Finally, the artist utilizes thin metal bands to incise the impasto he has formed. Both additive and subtractive, the paintings have surprising optical depths and a unique rhythmic sensation. The result is methodical and refined, yet impulsive and lyrical.

Carl Andre helped define the Conceptual and Minimalist art movements of the late 20th century. Andre’s work on view offers unique insight into the artist’s smaller-scale makings. His arrangements remain elementary, featuring factory-cut wood, Styrofoam, aluminum, and steel. The modular compositions are not symbolic or figurative, but rather real objects as honest as the surrounding gallery floors or walls. This raw simplicity is achieved through focus on the basic properties of matter—form, weight, and structure. The sculptures included in the exhibition, each standing below six inches tall, offer a more intimate and visceral entry into the artist’s oeuvre.

Altogether, Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre presents the recent work of two contemporary artists who both lean on mathematics and geometry to invent abstract, minimalist makings. Andre’s rudimentary sculptures and Lethbridge’s monochrome paintings complement one another—mutually revealing the simple yet profound truths of shape, color, and form.

Julian Lethbridge was born in Sri Lanka in 1947 and moved to England shortly thereafter. The artist would go onto study at Westchester College and Cambridge University (1960-1969). He presented his first exhibition of paintings and drawings in 1988 and continued to have one-person shows across thew country, from New York City to San Francisco. Today, Lethbridge’s work has been exhibited globally and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The artist currently lives and works in New York.

Carl Andre was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1935. Andre studied at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1951 to 1953, where he was introduced to Hollis Frampton and Frank Stella—two artist that would become influential to Andre’s career. Andre has had many significant retrospectives of his work, including those held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England. His work is in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London, among others. Andre lives and works in New York, NY.

Julian Lethbridge / Carl Andre, July 9 – August 8, 2021. On view at 55 Main Street, East Hampton, NY 11937. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery directly by email info@berggruen.com or by phone (415) 781-4629.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Paintings, an extensive exploration of light, color, and composition through the medium of paint. This exhibition will be on view June 22 - August 2020. You can view a selection of paintings from the exhibition through our ADAA viewing room here, or view the exhibition in person by scheduling an appointment here. For a more interactive view of the exhibition, we invite you to visit our virtual viewing room here.

From an exquisite example of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light series to the colorful environments of local, Bay Area painters Muzae Sesay and Jenny Sharaf, Contemporary Paintings abounds with saturated hues, graphic geometries, and varying techniques. Whether it be whimsical abstraction or meticulous realism, the paintings juxtapose one another to open dialogues regarding how artists render their surrounding world. The exhibition inaugurates the gallery’s reopening and summer programming, reflecting Berggruen Gallery's ongoing dedication to presenting exhibitions that bring together works from the contemporary canon and of historical significance. Furthermore, the show features a dynamic and diverse group of artists from several different countries, from the United States to South Korea to the United Kingdom, including works by:

Enrique Martinez Celaya
Mary Corse
Sarah Crowner
Austin Eddy
Matthew Feyld
Mark Fox
Shara Hughes
Matthew Day Jackson
Minku Kim
Paul Kremer
Des Lawrence
Julian Lethbridge
Sam Messenger
Odili Donald Odita
Clare Rojas
Sean Scully
Muzae Sesay
Jenny Sharaf

Contemporary Paintings, June 22 – August, 2020. On view by appointment only at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. To schedule an appointment, please click here. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Julian Lethbridge, an exhibition of twelve recent paintings by New York-based painter Julian Lethbridge. This show marks Lethbridge’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view November 29 through December 24, 2018. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 29 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.

Julian Lethbridge’s recent body of work probes the limits of depth, pattern, and rhythm translated through the formal elements of his medium: paint. Undulating patterns draw the eye across the canvas, creating a fluid sense of movement and flux, while thick impasto brushstrokes form a rippling surface texture that brings the medium to life. A symphony of curvilinear shapes forms intricate patterns that lend the canvas a tactile sense of depth, while the density achieved by successive layers of paint establishes a dynamic interplay of continuous geometry that is at once tumultuous and calm, impulsive and precise. This harmony of opposites lends Lethbridge’s work a visual spontaneity grounded in the artist’s controlled handling of color, tone, and spatial depth. The paint exudes an energetic dimensionality that recalls the dynamic mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, yet the intricate, lace-like patterns are subtle in their optical vibrations.

To create this body of work, the artist demonstrates the signature process he has expanded and refined since the 1980s. Lethbridge relies on a loose grid to create the foundation of the painting’s composition before building up the surface with pigment and paint. He first employs narrow brushes – an inch or two wide – to create a myriad of layers combining both oil paints and pigment sticks. To finish, using thin metal bands Lethbridge then incises these layers of pigment to create each work’s sinuous textural pattern. These repetitive forms pay homage to the artist’s disciplined approach to compositional structure, yet the underlying grid is liberated and loosened by the painterly color passages and textural surfaces that activate meditative relationships between movement and light.

This exhibition demonstrates the artist’s elegantly expanding palette. Painterly brushstrokes form rich, built up surfaces enhanced with vibrant applications of color echoed uniformly across the canvas, as Lethbridge subtly infuses his minimalist palette of black, white, and gray with energetic suffusions of color including warm hues of red, purple, blue, and pink. What emerges from this artistic process is the harmonious cadence of multiplying forms juxtaposed with the impulsive gesture of the artist’s hand, thus proposing a strong interplay between painterly and precise, unruly and composed. To view Lethbridge’s recent body of work is to expand one’s perception of painterly abstraction, further emphasizing the artist’s iconic style as a hallmark of contemporary painting.

Born in Sri Lanka in 1947 and brought up primarily in England, Julian Lethbridge received his education at Winchester College and Cambridge University. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art , New York; The Tate Gallery, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. In 1988, Julian Lethbridge was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He lives and works in New York.

Julian Lethbridge, November 29 – December 24, 2018. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by American artist Julian Lethbridge. New Paintings marks the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, and will be on view November 7 – December 14th, 2013. John Berggruen Gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, November 7th from 5:30 – 7:30 pm.



Julian Lethbridge continues his exploration of the rhythmic surfaces and optical depths of abstract painting. Beginning with seductive, luminous oil paints and pigment sticks, Lethbridge builds his compositions layer upon layer in an additive process that results in richly textured, complex images. Often a grooved grid or all-over textured paper provides the grounding layer, offering a stabilizing principle of organization over which the artist’s improvisational gestures take form. On top of his foundation, Lethbridge constructs undulating forms that may recall natural phenomena like a wave tumbling particles in a low tide or the rustle of wind.

Julian Lethbridge uses multiple, partially obscured layers of paint to create works of complex and disorienting spatial depth. The paintings have a methodical precision that works through, rather than against, the looseness of the artist’s hand. In a new series made for this exhibition, the dimensions of some of the frames reference the proportions of the human body. Six-foot-tall canvases physically engage the viewer. Upon close inspection, their seemingly random “all over” compositions reveal the trace of a highly choreographed movement of brushstrokes across the canvas.



These new works are a continuation of a process the artist has employed since the mid-1980s, using colored grounds on which rhythmic brushstrokes are overlaid. The grounds, spare underpaintings done in monochrome or with a limited palette, are carved to create burrs and ridges along their surface. These ridges provide an internal, closed structure upon which the highly worked webbing of the surface painting rests.



Born in Sri Lanka and brought up primarily in England, Julian Lethbridge received his education at Winchester College and Cambridge University. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Tate Gallery (London), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), and The National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.). In 1988, Julian Lethbridge was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He lives and works in New York.

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present A View From Above, a survey of works by American and International artists whose aesthetic styles and prolific works ask the viewer to slow down and consider their every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning. A View From Above will occupy the second floor of gallery space and will include work by artists Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Mark di Suvero, Olafur Eliasson, Helen Frankenthaler, Tom Friedman, Anish Kapoor, Julian Lethbridge, Julie Mehretu, Martin Puryear, Iran Do Espirito Santo, and Joel Shapiro. The exhibition opens Tuesday, May 17th and continues through Saturday, July 30th.



Vija Celmins received international attention early in her career for her renditions of natural scenes, which often dispel romantic notions of the sublime in nature. Celmins deliberately chooses as her subject a kind of pictorial information that looks familiar but tells us almost nothing about the realities to which it refers. On display, Starfield’s (2010) mere pattern of white dots separated by areas of densely worked graphite fittingly presents the viewer a myriad of options: is it an image the artist invented, was it viewed from a telescope by an astronomer who then photographed it, or was it a record made automatically by the instruments themselves: no one's view.



In similar fashion, questions cannot be detached from one’s experience of Mark di Suvero’s sculptures, which is hardly passive. Di Suvero’s interactive sculptures like Evrard's Marc (2010) which is on display ask you to move different parts, to walk around, and to watch elements turn and tilt. In relationship to the viewer’s movement, the angles constantly change. These mysterious instruments are at once aerodynamic and clunky; whose purpose one can never quite deduce.



Another highlight includes the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Ellison’s Super Star (2008). A rainbow star wrapped in brass bands suggests elliptical orbits, recalls holiday decorations, religious symbols, and children's toys. It also resembles a giant jewel, with gorgeously cut facets reflecting every color of the spectrum. But rather than settling on any one of these interpretations, it evokes a more expansive experience. Ingeniously crafted from tinted glass, mirrors, brass, and halogen light fixtures, it casts kaleidoscopic patterns on the domed ceiling and shines soft beams of light on visitors, who then become part of the art.



Two works by the London-based Indian artist Anish Kapoor will also be on display. Double (2004) and Untitled (2007) with blazingly reflective metal surfaces dispense multiple visual thrills and mysteries. They carve, color and complicate space in different ways, creating an interactive experience.



Other highlights include Julie Mehretu’s 15-foot-long abstract etching Auguries (2010), a combination of delicate markings reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy and bolder architectural shapes. The work was also the centerpiece of Notations After the Ring (2010), an exhibition at the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met, which grew out of the visual language she explored in a suite of six paintings that made up the Grey Area (2010) show at the Guggenheim Museum.



Works by Iran Do Espírito Santo, one of Brazil’s key contemporary artists, reveal his interest in industrial and everyday sculptural forms distilled down to their very essence. These sculptures, realized in deceptive “incongruous” materials belying the heavy mediums used to create his “cans” and “ice cream pots” - all strangely crafted in stainless steel and marble. The effect created is one of confronting a form’s pure essence.



Individual “views” of the world are expressed in this show in Helen Frankenthaler’s 1963 saturated painting September Image, Martin Puryear’s sculpture Face Down (2008), and Joel Shapiro’s Untitled (1986) falling figure. In all cases, these works provoke viewer participation, contemplation and individual responses.



For further information and photographs, please contact Tatem Read at 415.781.4629 or tatem@berggruen.com. Gallery hours: Monday - Friday: 9:30-5:30 Saturday: 10:30-5:00



Concurrent Artist Exhibitions:

Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966, LACMA, California through June 5, 2011



Mark di Suvero, curated by Storm King Center, Governors Island, New York through 2011



Olafur Eliasson: Din Blinde Passager (Your Blind Passenger), Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark through November 11, 2011



Anish Kapoor: Monumenta 2011, Grand Palais, France through June 20, 2011



Joel Shapiro, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany through May 29, 2011

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring work by Julie Mehretu, Julian Lethbridge, and Wayne Gonzales on view from February 3 to March 5, 2011. A preview will be held on Thursday, February 3rd from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.



Working from an archive of map clippings, newspapers, and banal outlines to elaborate city plans, and diagrams of war and historical destruction, Julie Mehretu’s paintings and prints attempt to make sense of what happens when these designs interact. Mehretu abstracts these organizational tools while abridging their histories to create new narratives that she describes as “story maps of no location.” With a cacophonous overlay of markings, her work captures and concentrates the dynamism and fluidity of various times and places.



Wayne Gonzales works between representation and abstraction, accumulating images from the internet and recasting them with a painter’s hand. Gonzales’ low-resolution, grey-scale paintings disrupt preconceived notions and permitting the viewer to develop their own interpretation of an image.



Employing luminous oil paints and pigment sticks, Julian Lethbridge builds up the canvas layer upon layer, creating rich, textural, and rhythmic images. Using a grid or other rough template, Lethbridge creates underlying system of stability on which he can make gestural strokes. The sequence of more varied forms demonstrates the artist’s interest in the repetition and inherent beauty of natural phenomena. The result is a meditative observation, both on the modernist grid and the organic interplay of surface, color, and depth.



For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery at 415.781.4629 or info@berggruen.com.