SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Altman Siegel is presenting an exhibition of new paintings by Tyler Ormsby. These highly textured and atmospheric oil paintings use narrative as a loose framework to explore color, shape, and form. Medium is allowed to stain and pool upon the canvas freely and is consequently added to with corpulent layers of viscous color, resulting in a complex and varied surface. Washes of tinted gesso are applied as a glowing base and built upon with a vine charcoal sketch from which dusty hues of titanium white, bone black, and lemon yellow begin to populate. Broad spaces of diffusely tinged canvas break up passages of heavy brushwork. The tension between these permissive, attenuated realms of painting contrasts with densely worked areas, creating a drama played out across the face of the paintings.

There is a melancholic quietude that resists characterization in this work but finds resonance with 19th-century painters Vulliard, Bonnard, and Munch. These works, carrying on a lineage of Post-Impressionist semi-abstraction, are both expressive and restrained, descriptive yet atmospheric. Unique to Ormsby’s practice is the application of velvety, muted pastel in tandem with rich tertiary color that exudes a weightiness wholly original and distinctly contemporary.

Here, figures are reduced and refined to their most uncomplicated forms. Stacked blocks of color striped bare of nearly all associative marks still manage to suggest a narrative. Ormsby demonstrates an adept command over an economy of imagery, merging minimalist tendencies with expressive, painterly moments. These landscapes, street scenes, and portraits intimate an iconography where mysterious foregrounded shapes, palettes, and textures take precedence over subject.

Tyler Ormsby (b. 1994, Vallejo, CA) Recent exhibitions include Gern en Regalia, New York (2025), New Remedios Enterprises, Manila (2024), Ruttowski 68, New York (2024), Et, al, San Francisco (2024), House of Seiko, San Francisco (2023), and Ratio 3, San Francisco (2020).