Jeffrey Cheung + Anna Valdez - "Meat & Potatoes"

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Meat & Potatoes, a two-person exhibition featuring work by Jeffrey Cheung and Anna Valdez. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both artists examine themes of personal identity through a lively combination of vivid color and simplified form. This month’s show includes acrylic paintings and ink drawings by Cheung, alongside oil paintings and digital renderings by Valdez. Combined, the work reverberates classic Post-Impressionism within a playful contemporary context.

Jeffrey Cheung’s painted figures can be found stretched across canvas, minutely drawn on paper or sprawled across the side of a building. Their curved limbs are often seen embracing one another or mischievously framing a wide grin. Focusing primarily on nude male figures, Cheung creates characters that manifest exuberance and physicality, while speaking to the counterparts of a romantic relationship. Frequently accentuating humor and eroticism in his paintings, Cheung explores the many faces and emotional aspects of partnership through the rhetoric of the nude portrait.

Anna Valdez brings forth a harmonizing counterpart to Cheung’s figurative works. Drawing reference from the domestic space of her Oakland studio, Valdez constructs compositions that hum with pattern and slowly formulate through detail and repetition. Although primarily consisting of various household objects, such as blankets, books, potted plants or the occasional Tecate can, these paintings serve more as an archive of personal identity. In the artist’s own words: “These items exist as a part of my domestic environment, and I have put them in my paintings to understand the domestic sphere as emblematic of both personal and collective experience.”

Please join us for Meat & Potatoes, opening Thursday, February 4 with an evening reception from 6pm - 10pm, where the artists will be in attendance.