Nancy Toomey Fine Art

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event source calendar Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ Chris Natrop Rainbow Thicket Glare November 4 to December 19, 2026 Artist Reception 5pm to 7pm Saturday, November 7 Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Chris Natrop titled Rainbow Thicket Glare on view from November 4 to December 19, 2026. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038. The public is invited to meet artist Chris Natrop at the gallery on Saturday, November 7, from 5pm to 7pm. View exhibition Chris Natrop, in his Rainbow Thicket Glare exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, cuts worlds that never existed. Each piece begins as a single sheet of paper and a blade. Tangles of ferns, vines, orbs, and drips emerge as he works without preconception. The cutting is slow, the decisions permanent. Natrop starts with swaths of drawing paper permeated with splashed-on watercolor, creating an abstract language to work against as he cuts with his utility knife. After the cutting is complete, bold color arrives in layers of hand-mixed acrylic, sprayed on. Spraying creates myriad gradients that behave as weather. Sun, clouds, and rainbows collide in a maelstrom of color, transforming the paper cutouts into self-contained alien ecosystems. Floating a quarter inch within shadowbox frames, each piece throws a nimbus of colorized drop shadow from its neon-painted backside, enveloping the cutout in an atmosphere of its own making. The canvases carry a different weight. Natrop sprays over stretched canvas while he paints the cutouts. Each pass leaves a layer of color shaped by what the paper blocks and what slips by. Forms print themselves in negative, then dissolve under countless passes. “Where the cut pieces are line and edge, these are pure color field,” says Natrop. “The spraying is fast, but the cutting that precedes it takes months. Each canvas gathers a season of work. I let it build, turn it, and stop it when the painted papercuts are complete. What survives is not just a byproduct of process, but an articulated world, a fully formed counterpart to the delineated cutouts.” Chris Natrop Born in 1967 in Milwaukee, Chris Natrop grew up in Hartland, Wisconsin, and relocated to California after receiving his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992. His idiosyncratic cutting method, which evolved some twenty years ago out of the process of charcoal drawing, uses an industrial utility knife on vertically mounted swaths of paper. He is known for immersive room-sized installations and large-scale projects. Natrop lived and worked in San Francisco from the 1990s to the early 2000s, where his process took shape in his Mission studio, featured on the local PBS program “Spark” in 2004. During those years he was also a fixture at the Headlands Center for the Arts, taking over the Bowling Alley Building as an Affiliate Artist, where he mounted his first site-specific cut paper installations before relocating to Los Angeles. He has shown throughout the US and Europe and has completed commissioned public sculptures in New York, Dubai, China, Houston, and Los Angeles. In 2016 he completed site-specific works for Facebook’s Playa Vista and Menlo Park campuses, and in 2020 a major public sculpture commissioned by the County of Los Angeles. Natrop is a recipient of several awards, including the Pulse Prize at Pulse New York, and his work is held in numerous public and private collections. Rainbow Thicket Glare is Chris Natrop’s fourth solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art. location provided by event source: "1275 Minnesota St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA" ―――――――――― SF Stuff To Do