In Good Company
In Good Company brings together significant works by artists whose practices have shaped the language of modern and contemporary art. The exhibition is grounded in proximity and resonance, where works are brought into relation across time, geography, and sensibility. In this space, meaning is not isolated within a single work but unfolds through adjacency, where each piece is experienced through the presence of what surrounds it.
The exhibition includes works by Wayne Thiebaud, Alexander Archipenko, Milton Avery, Frank Auerbach, Harry Bertoia, Elmer Bischoff, Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Max Ernst, Henry Moore, Manuel Neri, Auguste Rodin, Hassel Smith, Raimonds Staprans, Manolo Valdés, James Weeks and Max Weber.
At the center of the exhibition is a major oil painting by Wayne Thiebaud, a portrait of Charlie Campbell and his former wife Esther. Campbell, a San Francisco art dealer and gallerist, was an important figure within a generation of artists and institutions that shaped the cultural landscape of the region and beyond. The work holds a commanding place within Thiebaud’s practice, defined by its clarity of form and psychological presence, rendered with extraordinary restraint and control. Offered by the Charlie Campbell Estate, the painting reflects an artist at full command of his language, where surface, color, and structure are brought into precise alignment.
Surrounding this work is a selection that reflects a wide range of approaches and media while maintaining a shared level of distinction. Drawings by Pierre Bonnard and Willem de Kooning, also from the Charlie Campbell Estate, extend this intimate thread. Paintings by Milton Avery and Max Weber articulate different registers of modernist painting, from distilled chromatic calm to early abstraction. Sculptures by Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin assert the enduring force of the figure in space, while a chess set by Max Ernst introduces a more intimate but conceptually charged object, where play, design, and surreal logic converge.
To keep good company is both condition and aspiration. It describes a field in which works remain in dialogue not through direct correspondence, but through sustained presence, where meaning is shaped as much by adjacency as by origin.
Seen together, these works do not resolve into a single narrative. They hold one another in a field of attention, where difference is not diminished but made legible through proximity. In Good Company proposes relation itself as a structure of meaning, where works endure not only through individual force, but through the company they keep.
