Michael Gregory American, b. 1955

Featuring paintings, works on paper, sculpture, film, and archival ephemera from the SFMOMA Library, and SFAI archive, this ambitious exhibition showcases museum-quality works by contemporary and historical artists, illustrating Berggruen...

Exhibiting Artists:

Tauba Auerbach | John Baldessari | Larry Bell | Helen Berggruen | Sarah Blaustein | Katherine Boxall | Val Britton | Christopher Brown | Andy Burgess | Dean Byington | Bruce Cohen | Adriane Colburn | Travis Collinson | Mark di Suvero | June Edmonds | Charles Gaines | Daniel Gibson | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Michael Gregory | Stephen Hannock | Sarah Hotchkiss | Seth Kaufman | Clare Kirkconnell | Matt Kleberg | Anna Kunz | Charles Lee | Barry McGee | Klea McKenna | Tom McKinley | Vanessa Marsh | Richard Misrach | Nicole Mueller | Ed Ruscha | Richard Serra | Jillian Shea | Stephanie H. Shih | Kyle Warren Smith | Joni Sternbach | Marie Thibeault | Dani Tull | Darren Waterston | Griff Williams | Jonas Wood | Christopher Woodcock

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, an exhibition of new paintings. This show marks his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past will be on view from January 11th through February 29th, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 11th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

For over two decades, Michael Gregory has been interested in rural landscapes and architecture informed by road trips across the country. This fascination is dually formal and social: the artist is interested in the geometric structures of these rural buildings “punctuating” the soft, natural world, as well as these buildings’ centrality to a national myth constructed by farmers, ranchers, and “builders” in rural America. Gregory’s paintings descend from archaeological impulses rather than commemorative ones—his paintings document shifts in the American wilderness and its relationship with human intervention, rather than forwarding an outright celebration of American culture or history. Formally, the orientation of many of Gregory’s paintings might make them more accurately described as portraits for the buildings and landscapes which they depict, but they can also be understood as fictional “artifacts” exploring the germination and decay of American ways of living alongside nature’s strength and perpetuity.

Though his work is representational, Gregory takes inspiration from artists and movements across art history—he cites Bruegel, Rothko, Diebenkorn, Hopper, and the American Precisionists as influences. Gregory also uses the concept of the “sublime” from the Romantic landscape painters of the19th century. The sublime’s awe-inspiring power recalls the stasis and fluidity of time, exposing the emotional underpinnings of time’s passage. The cultural familiarity with rural structures and landscapes appeals to the viewer’s sense of nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, or return, and algos, or pain—homesickness. Despite the fact that each image is created from Gregory’s imagination, by playing on these familiar, nostalgic atmospheres, Gregory creates an equilibrium between past, present, and future, blurring temporal delineations to the degree that all points in time coalesce together. This dynamic recalls the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, from which the exhibition takes its name: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.” Gregory’s paintings suggest that the past and future are occurring alongside the present, thereby reorienting our relationship to the lands on which we live and the histories we inhabit.

Gregory was born in 1955 in Los Angeles, California. Gregory's work is included in many private and public collections, including the Boise Art Museum, Becton International Corporation, Delaware Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, Honolulu Advertiser Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, and the USEU Mission and Residence. Previously working from Bolinas, California, the artist currently lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.

Michael Gregory: Time Present, Time Past, January 11 – February 29, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.

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

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee, an exhibition of eighteen recent paintings by California artist Michael Gregory. This show marks Gregory’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 14 – February 13, 2021.

Michael Gregory’s most recent body of work presents a series of new oil paintings that render the vast, captivating, and almost ineffable beauty of the American landscape—a subject matter that has always fascinated the artist. Gregory writes, “America has always been an idea, a construct of our imagination, and our imagination has outdistanced even its vast boundaries and empty places. The American West has provided us a rich metaphor for a discussion of our hopes, aspirations and failures. It is the subject of literature, poetry, and song—part of our American common language.” Gregory’s landscapes, rich in detail, continue to expand this great American metaphor.

Though Gregory usually paints the American West, Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee traverses from New York’s Hudson River Valley to America’s Heartland to California’s Bay Area. Gregory has lived and worked in Bolinas, California for many years, but has recently built a studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. This most recent body of work is a result of the westward, cross-country road trip Gregory took from his New York home back to Bolinas in 2020. The journey provided Gregory with an expanded visual vocabulary of American landscapes and buildings. Once returned to his studio, Gregory reimagines these places onto canvas. While some scenes are actual, most are amalgams from memory. The paintings ultimately become odes to fictional locations that we still recognize as real places. In the end, Gregory provides his viewer with a special glimpse into an American experience—one of space, travel, loneliness, vicissitudes of fortune, and great beauty.

In 29 BCE, Virgil published a poem titled Georgics which disseminated the dual importance and tension bound up in agrarian life. The opening line reads “Optima dies prima fugit,” meaning “the best days are the first to flee.” Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee features eighteen new oil paintings depicting the artist’s signature barns and silos situated against broad plains, juts of rock greeting still river bends, and abandoned homes set against dramatic cloudscapes. Influenced by the Hudson River School, Gregory continues the tradition of prolific American landscape painting by imbuing his scenes with a luminous, transcendent quality. Yet Gregory also renews the movement with the inclusion of buildings, barns, granaries, or houses. The structures reflect, even pay homage to, the people who built, lived, worked, or left them. These individuals or communities are not painted into the picture, but their presence is palpable. We are left with scenes simultaneously remote, mysterious, and familiarly intimate.

Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. Gregory is represented in numerous, prestigious public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The U.S. Trust Company in New York, Microsoft Corporation, General Mills Corporation, Bank of America, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Gregory’s work has also been exhibited at major museums across the country, including The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; The Hunter Museum of Art, Tennessee; and The Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio. Gregory currently lives and works in Bolinas, California.

Michael Gregory: The Best Days Are the First to Flee, January 14 – February 13, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Open by appointment. 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 an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Gregory. 1000 Words marks Gregory’s twelfth solo exhibition at the gallery, and will be on view May 18 – July 1, 2017. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 18 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.

The landscape of the American West is a subject that has long captivated artists both past and present—its iconic symbolism is pervasive and is as debated as it is celebrated. As Gregory writes, “America has always been an idea, a construct of our imagination, and our imagination has outdistanced even its vast boundaries and empty places. The American West has provided us a rich metaphor for a discussion of our hopes, aspirations and failures. It is the subject of literature, poetry, and song—part of our American common language.” Gregory’s bucolic landscapes so elegantly evoke this character of the American West, conveying an appreciation for the continent’s beauty and its vastness.

Immersion in nature is a fundamental quality of humanity, one might say, because it connects us to this ideal and to history as embodied by the American West. The road trip is one such means by which we experience the American landscape, and it is via road trips that Gregory gleans content for his paintings. His journeys through the West, Midwest and Hudson Valley have inspired Gregory and his subject matter. “These paintings,” Gregory states, “are visual composites of these trips, re-imagined and re-constructed in the studio. Images are assembled on the canvas much like one would compose a still life. They are by their conception and resolution fictive places, but places we are from and hope to return. I would like to evoke in the viewer an experience of America’s vast reservoir of space, distance, solitude, loneliness and yes, beauty.” In his studio, Gregory often works on a number of paintings at a given time. They establish in this manner a dialogue in which one may suggest a solution for another. This dialogue, Gregory hopes, also extends outside the studio to the viewer. 1000 Words, inspired by the well known adage, speaks to the ability of painted imagery—a kind of language in and of itself—to expand written vocabulary. That is, the formal structure of a painting becomes a vehicle by which to access shared memory and experience.

The crux of Gregory’s paintings in relation to the vast oeuvre of American landscape painting lies in their signature subject matter—barns and silos painted in pristine and intricate detail against broad plains and mountains. These archeological sites call to mind remnants of lives once lived, eternally frozen in time. Gregory’s creations are a new genre of landscape portraiture, in which barns and buildings reflect and encapsulate the people who built them; indeed they are reminders of them. Gregory notes that so frequently descriptions of the American West romanticize and eulogize the landscape and its beauty. However, he observes, “our pastoral yearnings are far from the reality of an unforgiving landscape and the hard life on the range. The West is littered with buildings that are reminders of this struggle. For me, landscape is a metaphor; it is the stage where all human drama takes place.” Gregory’s landscape portraits—solitary barns nestled amidst colossal mountains, swallowed by a sea of grain, or showered by a heaven full of stars—pay homage to the human actors whose lives played out against the backdrop of the American landscape. Crows Heart, with its dark looming mountains, speaks to man’s frailty and insignificance in the face of nature or the vastness of the earth and cosmos.

Barns and building attract Gregory for their stark geometry, but he says, “They are also chosen for their emotional and symbolic resonance. We are reminded, by these structures in the vast landscape, of our human frailty in the face of time and the elements.” As such, they take on the role of memento mori. Time makes transient all people, places, and events. Rather than despair, however, Gregory celebrates these built reminders of eras past and breathes new life into structures long forgotten or abandoned. April’s Guest, inspired by a drive through the Willamette Valley in early spring, encapsulates the complimentary notions of life and death—the green spring grass represents new growth, new life; the dilapidated barn becomes a metaphor for decay, death. Life encompasses both, and Gregory notes that, “we live a fine line between heaven and earth and that in spite of all our technology and progress, we are all creatures of the earth.”

Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. Gregory’s work is featured in many private and public collections including the Boise Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The U.S. Trust Company in New York, Microsoft Corporation, General Mills Corporation, Bank of America, and the San Jose Museum of Art. The artist’s work has been shown at museums across the country including: The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; The Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Gregory currently resides in Bolinas, California

Michael Gregory: 1000 Words, May 18 – July 1, 2017. 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 new paintings by California-based artist Michael Gregory. Long Way Home marks Gregory’s eleventh solo exhibition at the gallery and will be on view July 10 – August 16, 2014. John Berggruen Gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 10th between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. to coincide with the San Francisco Art Dealers Association’s First Thursdays.

Michael Gregory is best known for his signature subject matter, that of barns, silos, and rural fields typically dwarfed against a backdrop of mountains or trees. Exhibiting a remarkable degree of photographic realism and richness in detail, Gregory’s paintings are entirely the product of the artist’s imagination. His landscapes are “constructs” of different buildings and places assembled and recreated by Gregory in his studio. In contrast to the tradition of “plein air” painters, Gregory does not aim to paint was he sees. Symbolic of a psychological state––an “inscape”––rather than a direct representation of the external world, Gregory’s landscapes become the stage sets where human drama plays out. Examining the seamless interaction between the geometry of the buildings and that of the landscape, Gregory calls attention to the barns and structures he paints as archaeological sites and remnants of lives once lived now eternally frozen in time. As such, the paintings in a Long Way Home are best classified as landscape portraiture, deviating from the conventions of traditional landscape painting in that they occasionally utilize a vertical canvas rather than a horizontal one. Gregory’s paintings, while set in a landscape, are not really landscape paintings. Rather, the landscape becomes the supporting character for people and their stories, told through what is left behind.

The paintings in a Long Way Home, as the title suggests, celebrate the road trip. Unlike in previous exhibitions, the inspiration for a Long Way Home derives from Gregory’s travels in his own backyard––the scenic landscape of Northern and Central California. For Gregory, exploring and experiencing the unknown or the unusual is a fundamental quality of humanity, something he calls a “genetic necessity.” Gregory captures in his landscapes, which simultaneously oscillate between the bucolic and the eerie, an unparalleled sense of quiet stillness paired with an overwhelming appreciation for the vastness of this continent. Gregory’s paintings evoke a fundamental sense of loneliness, isolation, and dislocation that aligns with the character of the American West. The artist intends for the theme of the road trip to serve as a metaphor for internal exploration. The journey towards personal knowledge and understanding takes an indirect route, one abound in obstacles and diversions. The road trip is akin to such a journey because there are no rules and no map, just the admonition to take your time and enjoy the Long Way Home.

Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. Aside from exhibiting on a regular basis at John Berggruen Gallery, Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York, and Gail Severn in Idaho, Gregory’s work is included in many private and public collections including the Delaware Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The U.S. Trust Company in New York, Microsoft Corporation, General Mills Corporation, Bank of America, and the San Jose Museum of Art. The artist’s work has been shown at museums across the country including: The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; The Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

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

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by California-based artist Michael Gregory. Five Hundred Miles marks Gregory’s tenth solo exhibition at the gallery, and will be on view July 12 – August 25, 2012. John Berggruen Gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 12 between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. to coincide with the San Francisco Art Dealers Association’s First Thursdays.



Gregory’s paintings, icons of the American landscape, radiate a contemporary old master look. His images of barns, silos, and prairie farms have become a signature subject for the artist. The title of this exhibition Five Hundred Miles refers to the road trips the artist takes to gather his images of the Midwest and West, and also honors the famous folk song by the same name. These paintings are visual composites of these trips, re-imagined and re-constructed in the studio. Gregory strikes a balance between beauty, hope and despair; and the loneliness of the Western landscape. As Gregory explains, “My paintings are collages made up of personal observation and experience, art history and interests that extend beyond the formal language of painting. While I love paint, the act of painting is subservient to the picture which stands for the idea.”



Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. In 2011, The Fort Collins Museum of Art in Colorado organized an exhibition of Gregory’s work entitled Western Construct, which traveled to the Butler Institute of American Art and the Arvada Center of Arts and Humanities. Gregory’s work is included in many private and public collections including the Delaware Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, Microsoft Corporation, General Mills Corporation, Bank of America, and the San Jose Museum of Art. The artist’s work has been shown at museums across the country including: The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; The Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.



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