Fall Season Brings Rich Gallery Offerings

One sure sign the Bay Area art gallery scene has reached a new stage in its maturation: The sheer impossibility of giving in-depth consideration to every good gallery exhibition, as the fall season unfurls. Here, then, is the first of two columns full of recently opened shows that readers won’t want to miss. Check back next week for more.

Not far away, at 10 Hawthorne Street, Berggruen Gallery begins its first fall in new digs with two shows that also run through October 28. The main floor is occupied by boldly graphic paintings by David Bates, a gallery stalwart. Upstairs, new work by Mark Fox comprises Berggruen’s first exhibition with the artist.

I have known Fox and watched the development of his art for more than 20 years, beginning in the days after he received a master’s degree from Stanford for his work as a painter. At the time, he had made a sharp turn away from the canvas. He was crafting puppet characters, employing them in surreal narratives on elaborate sets.

Later, he turned to a hybrid form of drawing, text and sculpture that caught the eye of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. Last year, Stanford’s Anderson Collection presented some of those works, which sometimes included entire Catholic doctrinal texts painstakingly cut into thousands of mounted words and phrases.

Knowing that background of obsessive attention to the wordas-object is useful in penetrating the dense works in the current show. Dense, in both a metaphorical sense and a literal one. All the objects exhibited, some of them 9 inches thick and nearly 7 feet across, are built up, layer by layer, of drawings and scrawled words on paper, glued one atop the next.

Some of the drawings might be hand-corrugated, then glued between two flat drawings to make a diaristic cardboard, laden with images, autobiography and ideas. As Fox draws on the surface, cuts into it, tears away or glues bits, the work is weighted by its a significance available in its entirety only to him.

One of the largest pieces in the show is Untitled (Plow), a heavy object warped and bound by its content, a giant blade with which to bulldoze a path through chaos to a roughly level spot.