In honor of our 50th anniversary, Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present the first in a series of exhibitions which celebrate the gallery’s history and early roots. In homage to our inception as a ceramics gallery which showed predominantly California artists, we present RBG at 50: focus on ceramics, with work by Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Richard Shaw, Dennis Gallagher, Ann Agee, Akio Takamori, Jun Kaneko, & Derek Weisberg, among others.

Rena Bransten opened Quay Ceramics Gallery, in partnership with gallerist Ruth Braunstein, originally located at 560 Sutter Street in San Francisco. One of her first shows was with Ron Nagle (1975); the press release states of the work, “They are very small in scale, and titled Cups, but they bear little relationship to the traditional cup form. The walls slant, bend, or swell away from the cylindrical shape….Using china paints in lustres, painted and sprayed in layers, Nagle achieves a richly colored surface ranging from deep tones to pastels.”

Pioneering ceramic artist Viola Frey started showing with the gallery in 1980 and continued until her death in 2004. States the press release from the 1980 exhibition Viola Frey: sculpture and paintings, “Most pieces are figurative and her sources are related to dimestore figurines and toys with a conscious attempt being made to have them span three generations of memories. Her paintings also show similar sources and Frey feels that her work in both mediums is interrelated.”

Dennis Gallagher had his first one-person show with the gallery in 1981. This excerpt is from his 1982 exhibition Dennis Gallagher: sculpture, “In the Bay Area clay sculpture tradition, Gallagher has explored using clay on a grand scale. His ‘roots’ can be seen in the work of Voulkos and DeStaebler, especially in his monumental scale and expressive treatment of surfaces. His sculptures have a quality of arrested motion and imply instability in their precarious verticality.”

Rena Bransten has devoted her life to supporting and promoting the voices of under-recognized artists, guiding the Gallery on the principals of close relationships, humanity, and belief in current scholarship. Advocacy for and friendships with artists and arts professionals has always been at the core of the Gallery’s ethos. As Bransten states, she is “very lucky, and it has been an extraordinary life in art.”