Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon, an exhibition of new work by American artist Heather Day. This show marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon will be on view from August 1 through September 19, 2024. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday August 1, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.

In her paintings, Heather Day explores landscape, the figure, memory, and sensation through surges of unabashed color, cut and sewn into biomorphic shapes which split and commandeer the canvas. At once harmonious and confrontational, Day’s paintings tangle with the relationship between the material and the conceptual, considering the indescribable phenomena which define our emotional and sensorial perceptions of our surroundings. In some respects a nomadic artist—while Day grew up in Hawaii, she was previously based in Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco, and now lives and works in the Mojave Desert—Day frequently mines her surrounding landscape for artistic inspiration, translating them into flowing washes deliberately arranged to incite the phenomenological experiences offered by these environments, rather than their objective realities. Her paintings simultaneously investigate the relationship between perception and memory through a unique process defined by abstraction and reconstruction.

Building on the foundation of pioneering Abstract artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Day’s process relies greatly on the elasticity and malleability of acrylic paint, exploiting its material qualities as a means of expressing emotion and sensation. Often working with acrylic paint at its most fluid, Day pools, washes, sponges, scrubs, and scrapes paint across canvas, before cutting into the surface and stitching the resulting shapes into new arrangements, adjoining the pieces in undulating, curvilinear shapes before affixing the final result to rectangular stretcher bars. This tedious reorganization affords her artworks an infrastructural stability that contrasts with the aqueous spread of the paint, resulting in paintings that are visceral, cerebral, and atmospheric, attenuating the divisions between reality and human perception of reality.

Heather Day (b. 1989) received her Bachelor of Fine Art in 2012 from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland where she studied painting and art history. Select solo and group presentations include Almine Rech, Paris (2024), Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2023), Art Basel, Miami (2023), The Armory Show, New York (2023), The Pit, Los Angeles (2022), among others. Day’s work has been featured in Art Forum’s must see (2020) and Galerie Magazine’s “Next Big Thing” (2022). Her paintings can be found in collections such as Fort Wayne Museum of Art and The Macedonia Institute.

Heather Day: Cut, Split, Horizon, August 1 – September 19, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.