Helen Berggruen

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by California artist Helen Berggruen. This marks Berggruen’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view from June 26 to August 14, 2025. A reception for the artist will take place on Thursday, June 26, from 5–7 PM. The gallery will also host a book signing for Helen’s upcoming publication, Small Worlds, on Wednesday, August 6, from 3:30–5 PM at 10 Hawthorne Street.

Helen Berggruen's paintings exude energetic universes—microworlds overflowing with character. Her full-spectrum palette and abundant use of mixed patterns and textures are packed with robust detail. Berggruen’s scenes feel familiar—landscapes, still lifes, and interiors reminiscent of the Post-Impressionists—her lively renderings animate the utilitarian into the fantastical through expressive gestures. Living room curtains twist; trees and florals reach and writhe. Streams of water and sky are filled with emphatic dabs of blue, yellow, and lavender.

Berggruen’s paintings sing with worlds beyond, with windows acting as portals to fictional universes just out of reach. In Powerlock, a desktop comes to life as everyday objects dance across its surface—paint brushes, scissors, and stacks of books abound. Tractors and trucks move hurriedly down Parisian cobblestones and through rural industrial landscapes; the storybook quality of Berggruen’s work playfully hints at narratives full of folly and adventure. Plucking her characters from her own drawings based on art historical sculptures and paintings, Berggruen breathes new life into her subjects, building stages and worlds in which they might self-actualize or drift into the cosmos through her painterly world-building. Filled with warmth and movement, her depictions of quotidian scenes become spirited worlds, each object and detail with its own allegorical significance; they act as celebrations of observation and rearrangement. Based in San Francisco, California, Helen Berggruen has exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally.