Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition from celebrated artist Oliver Lee Jackson. The exhibition will include paintings and drawings that excite, mystify and charm with their technical virtuosity and sheer physicality, as they invite the viewer to travel to another realm.

These large scale colorful paintings and intricate works on paper are celebratory in nature and invite us to rejoice in seeing for the sake of seeing. Throughout his over five-decade career, Jackson has continued to explore pictorial and perceptual power, force, and sacred space. While his works contain (often recurring) figures, he circumvents expectations of a narrative. Jackson’s intention is to “get past the eyes” and let the mind travel to a state that is unfamiliar and compelling, allowing the work to unveil itself through time and layer by layer. Through this we discover figurative elements embedded within and inseparable from the field: crouched or lying figures, faces in profile, flowers, silhouetted birds, the cone shape of an eye, or an extended arm with pointing finger. In disengaging these figurative elements from a narrative, we may become open to seeing in a new way, allowing ourselves to get lost within the field, and Jackson continually challenges us to do so.

Affiliated in the 1960s with the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, Oliver Lee Jackson’s work has been exhibited extensively over the past several decades. His artworks are in the permanent collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Jose Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and many other public and private collections across the U.S. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Rena Bransten Gallery is honored to present the work of Oliver Lee Jackson who has been a friend of the gallery since his first solo exhibition with us in 1982.