Image: Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Berggruen Gallery will present ‘the passenger,’ an exhibition of recent paintings by Northern California artist Liam Everett, from September 10 through October 29, 2026, in San Francisco. The exhibition marks Everett’s first solo presentation with the gallery and brings together a new body of works made with ink, oil, sand and wood ash on linen.
The paintings grow out of Everett’s research into light, quantum biology and the relationship between ultraviolet light, photons and physiology. According to the gallery, this research has led the artist to consider light not only as a visual or symbolic phenomenon, but also as an element connected to living systems and consciousness. His paintings investigate the boundary between what can be seen and what remains outside ordinary visibility.
In ‘the passenger,’ Everett works with less gestural accumulation than in earlier bodies of work. The gallery describes the paintings as atmospheric fields in which subtle suggestions of horizons and cosmological space emerge. Their surfaces are built through erasure and experimentation, using layers of sand, pigment and alcohol; abrasions and deposits remain as luminous residues of the process. The works are also shaped by the changing sunlight in Everett’s Northern California studio, with each canvas responding to the conditions in which it was made.
Selected works include ‘Untitled (the reservoir),’ a 2026 painting measuring 37 by 78 inches, and ‘Untitled (the emissary),’ which measures 58 by 36 1/2 inches. Other paintings in the presentation include ‘Untitled (the cardinal),’ ‘Untitled (pareidolia),’ ‘Untitled (first memory)’ and ‘Untitled (ying-spring).’ The works range in scale from 16-by-20-inch paintings to the 78-by-60-inch ‘Untitled (pareidolia)’ and a circular 63-inch-diameter canvas titled ‘Untitled (first memory).’
The gallery’s account of Everett’s practice also connects his physical approach to painting with his experience of growing up in the theater. He works around canvases placed on the floor and uses tools including a rusted trowel, an axe and a broken bean pole. His garden functions as an extension of the studio, linking planting and landscape work with the processes of building and renewing a painting.
Everett was born in 1973 in Rochester, New York, and lives and works in Northern California. His work has been included in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa and the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium, among others. His work is held in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Kistefos Museum in Norway and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Berggruen Gallery will host a discussion with Everett moderated by Mari Robles, chief executive officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at 4:30 p.m. on September 10. An opening reception will follow from 5 to 7 p.m. The gallery is located at 10 Hawthorne Street in San Francisco.
