Hosfelt Gallery

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event source calendar Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ STEFAN KÜRTEN Echoes From the Past 8 Sep – 10 Oct, 2026 Reception: Thursday, 10 September, 5–7 PM German painter Stefan Kürten is known for depicting the domestic architecture of our dreams – rich with the promise of mid-century prosperity – yet uncannily depopulated, and in the surreal palette of a colorized film or in burnished gold and shadowy blacks. Luxurious, seductive and unsettling, these images of the “perfect home” explore the power of familiar-looking spaces to challenge the veracity of your memory: “Have I been here before? Do I know this place?” For the first time in his nearly 40-year career, the answer is “Yes.” Kürten’s newest work shifts from imagined buildings to real, politically and culturally loaded ones: the White House, the New York Stock Exchange, the legendary Dakota Apartments and Chateau Marmont, and San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Classical rather than Modernist in style, these structures were designed to symbolize timelessness, solidity, prestige and entitlement. But they were inspired by the misperceived and idealized ruins of long-dead civilizations. In Kürten’s paintings, you get the sense that you’re a witness to these bastions of American authority the moment they too degenerate into ruin. Carved into wooden panels that would normally be used to make woodblock prints, then painted, Kürten subverts the purpose of his art-making materials to remind us of unrealized potential – of the prints that will never be made and the stability we so desire, but never quite find. Along with these studies of power and collapse are three of Kürten’s monumentally scaled, all-over-pattern compositions, kaleidoscopically covered in an architectural jumble of autobiographical, historical, and cultural references. If the carved works envision monuments to our collective aspirations, these sprawling paintings turn inward, toward the more personal architecture of memory and desire. Exhibited together, they depict the worlds we build in pursuit of the perfect life — homes, institutions, narratives, ideals — and ask us to consider what we find when those fantasies begin to crack apart. Hosfelt Gallery has represented Stefan Kürten since its founding in 1996. This is the eleventh solo exhibition stemming from that partnership. Kürten was formerly a professor at the famed Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where, as a young artist, he studied with Michael Buthe. He is also an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute. Solo museum exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany; Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf; Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg, Germany. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and many others. He lives with his wife and daughter in Düsseldorf. REQUEST A PREVIEW ======================================= SARAH M. NEWTON Interruptions in the Bay Trail 8 Sep – 10 Oct, 2026 Reception: Thursday, 10 September, 5–7 PM Sarah Newton explores the margins where the San Francisco Bay and human occupation collide. Her practice begins with the 350-mile Bay Trail, or more accurately, a series of paths that ring the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. The project to build a continuous, public shoreline path started in 1987 and is, as yet, incomplete. Newton takes public transportation to various sections of the trail, then hikes to the places where it ends abruptly or peters out... often in parking lots, embankments, or subdivisions. Rather than render a picturesque view of a magnificent landscape, Newton focuses on the spot where the natural and human-made meet. Exquisitely executed on either grey or brown paper, the drawings' historicism refers to nineteenth- and early tw…