San Francisco Art Fair 2025: Booth A03

Altman Siegel is pleased to present works by Shinpei Kusanagi and Trevor Paglen at this year's edition of the San Francisco Art Fair. From examining governmental forces to concretizing complex, multi-sensory memories, Kusanagi and Paglen compel viewers to stay tuned to the present moment. While both artists have engaged heavily with the landscape for decades in their respective mediums, this marks the first time their work will be presented in tandem.

Tokyo based painter Shinpei Kusanagi's gestural abstractions evoke elements in nature and the landscape. Building intricate compositions with vibrant colors and energetic brushwork, Kusanagi's work is concurrently playful, and serene. Utilizing a technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese nijimi, Kusanagi stains raw canvas with layers of translucent color to explore the abstract experience of memories rather than depict an exact representation of them. Through various diaphanous washes and gestures, Kusanagi's paintings crystallize time, physical movement, and psychological presence.

Artist, filmmaker, and theorist, Trevor Paglen asks questions about vision, perception, materiality, and aesthetics. His wide-ranging oeuvre includes work on surveillance both military and corporate, artificial intelligence and computer vision, speculative fiction, and most recently, novel aerial phenomena. Paglen mines the history of photography to raise questions about how the act of seeing informs our beliefs and affects our national ideologies. Throughout his career, Paglen has investigated the role images play in structuring geography and systems of power. By highlighting hidden forces in our surrounding landscape, Paglen examines our fraught relationship with the environment and technology.

Shinpei Kusanagi's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery, Hong Kong, China; Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Gallery Sora, Tokyo, Japan; Bankart Studio, Yokohama, Japan; Makii Masaru Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan; and Janjanble, Tokyo, Japan. Group exhibitions include Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto, Japan; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou, China; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Palace Pocia, Vienna, Austria; among others. The artist's work can be found in the collections of the LOEWE Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; and the UBS Art Collection, London, UK.

Trevor Paglen's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Pace Gallery, Seoul, Korea and New York, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Barbican Centre, London, UK; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; MCA San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Secession, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, Norway; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. A selection of group exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Kunsthal Charlotteanborg, København, Denmark; Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany; 14th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Kumamoto, Japan; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, and New Museum, New York, NY. Paglen received the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2018 and was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.