SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery announces an exhibition of new work by Ann Gale, on view during the month of October.
Gale paints her human subjects not as fixed entities, but as sites of ongoing experience. Her canvases gather time, compressing shifts in light, posture, and perspective into portraits set in motion. Each painting is a study in simultaneity, where the body is both precisely rendered and dissolved in time.
The artist’s relationship to her subjects is sustained and deeply felt. She returns to the same people over years, allowing the arc of their presence to unfold in paint. These are not fleeting encounters but evolving collaborations. “There is always something that makes me want to paint someone again,” she observes. What compels her is a sense of both presence and the human condition: our fragility, our strength, and the quiet resilience of living in a body, alone and separate from each other.
In Gloria Blue Band, Gloria is seated nude in a chair, her voluptuous body directly facing the picture plane and captured with unflinching clarity. There is no self-consciousness in her pose, only unapologetic presence. Despite her nakedness, she does not display vulnerability; rather, in a twist, we experience our own vulnerability before her. Like Gloria, Robert is another one of Gale’s long-time models. In Robert Lying Down, he is shown prone on an elevated surface, eyes closed, hands folded over his chest, knees bent. The positioning of his body recalls repose or mourning, as if immediately before or after a reckoning. Gale painted this work while Robert was preparing for surgery, and the emotional weight and anticipation of that moment is palpable. It was almost as if, Gale explains, she could feel the ache of his body in her own.
Zeke in a Wing Chair features a more recent model. The high-backed armchair in which Zeke sits hugs his body, which is partially draped in black fabric; his legs are crossed, his hands are folded in his lap, and his gaze is calm and steady. The composition evokes the iconography of classical portraiture, as if we are looking at royalty—not by birthright but by self-possession. The body as a vessel of experience takes on additional meaning here as Zeke, a gym trainer, has transitioned. By rendering him with the same careful attention she brings to all her subjects, Gale translates lived experience into tactile form, merging the act of seeing with the act of sensing.
Gale’s distinctive style—patches of paint of varying size, shifting chromatic fields, and planes of light—does not obscure her sitters but reveals them more fully. Faces are rendered in greater detail, but even here, the eyes often evade us. They blur or disappear, as if resisting the finality of being known. Movement and time enter the frame: a head tilts, an arm twists, light changes. Gale holds onto each of these moments without covering them up or resolving them as she negotiates between the optical and the emotional.
Ultimately, Gale’s work offers a profound meditation on what it means to see and be seen. Her paintings ask us to meet her subjects not with certainty, but with attention. To witness their presence the way she does: slowly, physically, and with care.
Ann Gale was born in 1966 and earned her BFA from Rhode Island College and MFA from Yale University. In addition to exhibiting across North America, Gale is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, a Washington Arts Council Fellowship in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1996, among others. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Academy of Art and Design, New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon; and the Tucson Museum of Art. This is her fourth solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.
