Frances Lerner
POKE
July 8 - August 26
Artist Reception: Saturday July 15, 2 - 5PM
Dejected Unicorn, 2022-23, wool felt & vintage wood grain scoop on wood composite
The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to present new work by Bay Area artist, Frances Lerner. Lerner is one of those rare artists who, for years, has managed and preferred to work under the critical radar. When she does show her work publicly, which is not often, it gets attention.
Art critic Kenneth Baker in 2009 referred to Lerner as “the great discovery here” when writing about her work in “New Images of Man and Woman” at Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley along side artwork by Nathan Oliveira and Stephen de Staebler. He further described her unique style as "calming and alarming."
DeWitt Cheng in 2019 said, “The poetic, introspective art of Frances Lerner, of modest scale and subdued color, eschewing the gaudy assertiveness of art-fair art, exemplified the values of synthesis, and unassertive seriousness. Lerner’s paintings, prints, and assemblages, (including her recent wool sculptures and paintings) tread the knife-edge between innovation and tradition with a sure foot.”
Frances Lerner writes, "In my first memories of making art, I am at my aunt’s house in Cleveland: making little poke-marks on the wall and braiding the fringe on her brocade sofa. Decades later, here I am: still marking up surfaces and playing with fabric. Almost all the work was done by poking a single needle into bits and pieces of felt, a process that causes me to marvel as hundreds of tiny holes gather to create a whole."
"Underlying this series are the twin themes of “there but for the grace of God go I” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.” These themes have been present in my work for decades now, as I have long held a reverence for the special beauty of the worn, the spent, the frayed, the tattered, threadbare and bruised. In the past, this reverence manifest as paintings of rag-puppets in broken-down industrial settings. I love to juxtapose the unexpected and, for the paintings, I studied the techniques of old Dutch masters to impart a luminous beauty to the desolate scenes of shabby figures bending over their various ramps, chutes, and gears. Then, to create the POKE series, I asked myself: “If the puppets were in an art-factory, what would their art look like?”
It’s this question that led me to the new works offered in POKE. In moving from two to three dimensions, I was excited to add a tactile, spatial, and somehow “real world” component to my previous work—as though the puppets themselves had stepped out of the paintings and created the felt-works while I was sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping, though! I’ve been wool-gathering, dyeing, tearing, wadding, and—yes—poking away. Through it all, my goal has been to evoke a quality of ironic nostalgia, a mixture of pathos and tenderness that I hope is palpable in the softness and shabbiness of these strange shapes that seemed to will their own way through my fingers." Frances Lerner 2023
Zoom Meeting, 2022, oil paint on canvas, decorative mirrors, 18" x 24"
Infinite, 2021-22, needle felted merino wool, sequin on sealed seaweed
Blue Headlights, 2022, gauze, sweater fragments & flashe paint on
wood panel, 16" x 20"
Untitled, 2023, vintage wool sweater fragments, vintage scarf, needle felting, tweed jacket fragment on wood backing, wood scoop
Rags to Riches, 2023, crystal bowl and, fabric, wool sweaters, needle-felt,
8" x 9"
Lapat Situation, two pieces: vintage, painted wood scoop, wool sweater fragment felted.
Whistle, 2022, needle felting on vintage scarf, wooden letter C
Suitcase, 2022-23, Needle felted wool, vintage scarf, vintage sweater, sari twine, cement on polyester dress fragment
Dark Matter, 2021-22, black gesso, oil, cement, mesh on panel, 16" x 20”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Frances Lerner was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for thirty eight years. She studied with reknown printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky, at the University of Iowa for her MFA.
She has been represented by Jack Fischer gallery in San Francisco, Alphonse Berber in Berkeley and Korblatt gallery in Baltimore & Washington. She has received numerous art council grants including from the Maryland, Sonoma, Napa, and Washington DC arts councils. Through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lerner was awarded a position of Artist-in-Residency of Salzburg, Austria. At Alphonse Berber gallery in Berkeley, art historian Peter Selz chose her work for the show “New Images of Man and Woman”, a sequel to the 1959 show, “New Images of Man” in New York’s the Museum of Modern Art.
Frances Lerner’s work was included in both the Aqua Miami and Miami Project, satellite exhibitions of Art Basel. Recent exhibitions include Underground at Arkad Center d’Art in Auvillar, France and After All at the Commonweal Center in Bolinas, California. Lerner’s work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Museum of Art, US Embassy in Austria, University of San Francisco, Salzburg, Austria Artist in Residence Program through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberlin College.
Frances Lerner currently lives and works in El Cerrito, California.
Frances Lerner
POKE
July 8 - August 26
Artist Reception: Saturday July 15, 2 - 5PM
Dejected Unicorn, 2022-23, wool felt & vintage wood grain scoop on wood composite
The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to present new work by Bay Area artist, Frances Lerner. Lerner is one of those rare artists who, for years, has managed and preferred to work under the critical radar. When she does show her work publicly, which is not often, it gets attention.
Art critic Kenneth Baker in 2009 referred to Lerner as “the great discovery here” when writing about her work in “New Images of Man and Woman” at Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley along side artwork by Nathan Oliveira and Stephen de Staebler. He further described her unique style as "calming and alarming."
DeWitt Cheng in 2019 said, “The poetic, introspective art of Frances Lerner, of modest scale and subdued color, eschewing the gaudy assertiveness of art-fair art, exemplified the values of synthesis, and unassertive seriousness. Lerner’s paintings, prints, and assemblages, (including her recent wool sculptures and paintings) tread the knife-edge between innovation and tradition with a sure foot.”
Frances Lerner writes, "In my first memories of making art, I am at my aunt’s house in Cleveland: making little poke-marks on the wall and braiding the fringe on her brocade sofa. Decades later, here I am: still marking up surfaces and playing with fabric. Almost all the work was done by poking a single needle into bits and pieces of felt, a process that causes me to marvel as hundreds of tiny holes gather to create a whole."
"Underlying this series are the twin themes of “there but for the grace of God go I” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.” These themes have been present in my work for decades now, as I have long held a reverence for the special beauty of the worn, the spent, the frayed, the tattered, threadbare and bruised. In the past, this reverence manifest as paintings of rag-puppets in broken-down industrial settings. I love to juxtapose the unexpected and, for the paintings, I studied the techniques of old Dutch masters to impart a luminous beauty to the desolate scenes of shabby figures bending over their various ramps, chutes, and gears. Then, to create the POKE series, I asked myself: “If the puppets were in an art-factory, what would their art look like?”
It’s this question that led me to the new works offered in POKE. In moving from two to three dimensions, I was excited to add a tactile, spatial, and somehow “real world” component to my previous work—as though the puppets themselves had stepped out of the paintings and created the felt-works while I was sleeping. I haven’t been sleeping, though! I’ve been wool-gathering, dyeing, tearing, wadding, and—yes—poking away. Through it all, my goal has been to evoke a quality of ironic nostalgia, a mixture of pathos and tenderness that I hope is palpable in the softness and shabbiness of these strange shapes that seemed to will their own way through my fingers." Frances Lerner 2023
Zoom Meeting, 2022, oil paint on canvas, decorative mirrors, 18" x 24"
Infinite, 2021-22, needle felted merino wool, sequin on sealed seaweed
Blue Headlights, 2022, gauze, sweater fragments & flashe paint on
wood panel, 16" x 20"
Untitled, 2023, vintage wool sweater fragments, vintage scarf, needle felting, tweed jacket fragment on wood backing, wood scoop
Rags to Riches, 2023, crystal bowl and, fabric, wool sweaters, needle-felt,
8" x 9"
Lapat Situation, two pieces: vintage, painted wood scoop, wool sweater fragment felted.
Whistle, 2022, needle felting on vintage scarf, wooden letter C
Suitcase, 2022-23, Needle felted wool, vintage scarf, vintage sweater, sari twine, cement on polyester dress fragment
Dark Matter, 2021-22, black gesso, oil, cement, mesh on panel, 16" x 20”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Frances Lerner was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for thirty eight years. She studied with reknown printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky, at the University of Iowa for her MFA.
She has been represented by Jack Fischer gallery in San Francisco, Alphonse Berber in Berkeley and Korblatt gallery in Baltimore & Washington. She has received numerous art council grants including from the Maryland, Sonoma, Napa, and Washington DC arts councils. Through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lerner was awarded a position of Artist-in-Residency of Salzburg, Austria. At Alphonse Berber gallery in Berkeley, art historian Peter Selz chose her work for the show “New Images of Man and Woman”, a sequel to the 1959 show, “New Images of Man” in New York’s the Museum of Modern Art.
Frances Lerner’s work was included in both the Aqua Miami and Miami Project, satellite exhibitions of Art Basel. Recent exhibitions include Underground at Arkad Center d’Art in Auvillar, France and After All at the Commonweal Center in Bolinas, California. Lerner’s work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Museum of Art, US Embassy in Austria, University of San Francisco, Salzburg, Austria Artist in Residence Program through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberlin College.
Frances Lerner currently lives and works in El Cerrito, California.