Rachel Simon Marino: Running on Air

Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Running on Air, an exhibition of new paintings by San Francisco–based artist Rachel Simon Marino. This show marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Running on Air will be on view from March 12 through April 30, 2026. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 12, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Rachel Marino’s visual worlds exist, as she describes them, “when a character has run off the cliff but before they’ve fallen.” Her illusionistic paintings depict fantastical scenes of suspended action at the turning point of disaster or drama. Teeming with Day-Glo color and graphically patterned landscapes and interiors, Marino’s bold playful chromaticism arrests the viewer with assertive joy. Ladders break into two, fences split, bricks fall to the earth. Doorways lead to doorways which lead to windows. Figures depicted with tailored trousers, loafers, and heels emerge either in pursuit or at the moment of defeat. Through a dramatic play of light and shadow, along with symbols tucked into each corner, Marino creates cinematic spaces where everything is frenetically alive and slightly afoot—a masterful teetering between the real and the unreal.

Marino’s interest in the uncanny was shaped by her childhood experiences of debilitating migraines. When undergoing a migraine, she would enter a semi-hallucinatory state in which she lost touch with her body and surroundings. For years, these perceptual disturbances were dismissed by doctors and attributed to an overactive imagination. Marino began to translate these experiences into her artwork, attempting to replicate the shifting scales and perspectives that arose during a migraine. This would later be diagnosed by a neurologist as a rare disorder called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Of this, Marino said: “If my early experiences fractured my sense of reality, the work reconstructs it as something we can enter together: vivid, askew, and full of possibility.”

Marino composes her paintings through a meticulous process of drawing, miniature set building, and photographing a model, and herself, in costume. This process was influenced by her many years working as a set designer and prop fabricator. Her influences range widely, from Old Masters such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, and Goya to Bay Area Figurative and Funk artists Joan Brown and Viola Frey. Her visual language is also heavily influenced by filmmaking, animation, and pulp novels. Threads of an eclectic and expansive visual repertoire can be found in Marino’s paintings, evident in a visual iconography that escapes neat classification.

Marked by humor and satire, the subject matter of Marino’s paintings draws on the current sociopolitical moment—a time in which everything appears shocking, absurd, and surreal. Marino works at the site of a spectacle: when a scene becomes charged with ambiguity and discomfort, yet one can’t help but look away; when reality threatens to tip, by some ambiguous action or alien force, from dream to nightmare. It’s hard to imagine a time in which these paintings could be more relevant.

Rachel Simon Marino (b.1989, San Francisco) attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her BFA in 2011. In 2019, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Hit Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is frequently featured in group presentations in the United States, including recent exhibitions at the De Young Museum (San Francisco), Evergold Projects (San Francisco); Guerrero Gallery (Oakland); and Rena Bransten Projects (Chicago). In addition to her studio practice, Marino has a significant history in illustration and prop design. Marino lives and works in San Francisco, California.