Renée Gertler, ‘A Deep Churning,’ 2025; Ink, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper. (K. Imperial Fine Art)
There are just a few days left to visit Renée Gertler’s radiant solo show at K. Imperial Fine Art, a show that’s only been open by appointment since its May 8 opening. Let me digress for a moment. This “by appointment” business is a bit of a pet peeve for me. Requiring previous know-how is antithetical to the delight that is artistic discovery.
People visiting 49 Geary — where Fraenkel, Euqinom and other galleries still hold court — should be able to stumble across Gertler’s work; puzzle through its lines, curves and glowing sprays of color; think about waves of energy; and emerge, I predict, a bit lighter.
Becoming Light, the title of Gertler’s show, offers the first puzzle. Is it “light” as in weight, or “light” as in the visible spectrum? There is an airiness to most of the work on view: ink, colored pencil and acrylic on 30-inch wide sheets of paper. Celestine Vibrations, vertical lines flanked by red and blue airbrushed curves, wobbles and shimmers.
Renée Gertler, ‘Celestine Vibrations,’ 2024. (K. Imperial Fine Art)
When these drawings get dense, as in the case of A Deep Churning, a motion-filled sea of small marks that conjure a murmuration of starlings, they become portals. Less terrestrial, more cosmic.
Gertler is partial to a cornea-sizzling ultramarine blue, which forms the ground for her works on panel and coats her plaster sculptures. The latter, comfortably scaled, exist somewhere between objets d’art, architectural maquettes and unclassifiable useful things.
Does Gentle Remembering actually facilitate the retrieval of memories? Does Dream to Me turn aspirations into something more tangible? Tight rows of glass beads attached like scales to the organic planes of these sculptures give them a jazzy Art Deco vibe. Those silvery trails, even at this small scale, dazzle just as much as Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s regimented mirror mosaics.
Renée Gertler, ‘Nine Moons,’ 2024; Plaster, paper media, beads, aluminum mesh and paint. (K. Imperial Fine Art)
(Someone please give Gertler a commission to render these strange, decidedly not-phallocentric shapes at a monumental scale. I hear there’ll eventually be an opening at Embarcadero Plaza.)
Back to Becoming Light: There is something incantatory and magical about all of Gertler’s work on display. Amid imperfect, hand-rendered geometric shapes, light sprays of paint and bell-shaped curves, it’s clear Gertler is channeling something beyond the visible.
In the Bay Area, with its swirling mix of woo-woo and high tech, what you tune into matters. Gertler is providing visualizations of less immediate, less precise transmissions — whether of sounds, light, energy, we’re not quite sure. But Becoming Light is a reminder of just how much there is beyond our five senses, beyond our individual experiences and our human scales of time and space.
But before that can sink in, you need to make an appointment.
‘Becoming Light’ is on view at K. Imperial (49 Geary St. Suite 415, San Francisco) through June 30, 2025. Email kimperialfineart@me.com to make an appointment.
