Abundance of botanical forms and monumental paintings reflects optimism at San Francisco’s Fog Design+Art fair

The walkway between piers 2 and three on the twelfth version of Fog Design+Artwork in San Francisco may need been a purple carpet for a way star-studded it appeared throughout the honest’s preview gala on Thursday night time (22 January). In all places one regarded, there have been sequin capes, glittering robes, bedazzled blazers and rhinestone-encrusted ties. The honest’s director, Sydney Blumenkranz, says the gala is all the time high-energy however this 12 months’s temper appeared significantly buoyant. Greater than 2,700 friends crowded the aisles over the course of the night time, the best variety of preview gala attendees within the honest’s historical past.

First-time guests and returning sellers alike praised the standard of the 65 shows on the honest this 12 months. Works by native and worldwide rising artists share wall and ground area with these by canonical masters like Ruth Asawa and Leonora Carrington. The San Francisco vendor Jessica Silverman’s stand, one of many honest’s most distinctive, gathers blue-hued works from greater than 20 artists together with a Masako Miki cloud determine and one among Loie Hollowell’s biomorphic abstractions—each of which bought on opening night time.

Hauser & Wirth’s stand features a tender Luchita Hurtado portray of the artist’s naked torso with an egg in her butter-yellow hand, in addition to a kineticmixed-media work by Rashid Johnson. The gallery reported the largest sale of the honest’s night, inserting Jack Whitten’s Photo voltaic House (1971) for greater than $1m. “It felt like actual momentum,” says Amanda Stoffel, a companion and head of gross sales for California at Hauser & Wirth, “and a really promising sign for the 12 months forward.”

One other potential harbinger of a greater 12 months for the artwork market was the ubiquity of large-scale work. The 2025 development towards tiny canvases was changed by monumental works like Jongsuk Yoon’s vibrant abstraction on Marian Goodman Gallery’s stand, which stretches greater than 26ft broad. Lisson is exhibiting an almost 8ft-tall, lavender-hued portray by the San Francisco native Oliver Lee Jackson. And David Zwirner’s stand contains Portia Zvavahera’s dreamy figurative composition Takasunungurwa (2025), which spans greater than 8ft.

Alongside all of the large-scale canvases, there are additionally a big variety of diminutive sculptures at Fog, from a 4in woven black ash and sweetgrass basket by Jeremy Frey on Karma’s stand to a number of 2in glazed ceramic pots by Doyle Lane, exhibiting with David Kordansky.

Among the many work on view, geometric abstractions outnumber illustration—except for floral imagery. Tallying botanical compositions on the honest rapidly crammed a web page in my pocket book. On opening night time, the New York-based gallery Charles Moffett bought out its sales space of luscious, flower-filled nonetheless lifes by the Los Angeles-based artist Hopie Hill.

The honest provides a optimistic potpourri of floral kinds: Berrguren’s stand encompasses a wealthy botanical collage with poppies, gladiolas and columbines by Jane Hammond; native vendor Wendi Norris is exhibiting a large-scale portray of yellow daisies sprouting amongst dried grass by Enrique Martinez Celaya; and mesmerising botanical abstractions by Patricia Iglesias Peco are turning heads at François Ghebaly sales space. Amongst different verdant works on Nino Mier Gallery’s stand, Tony Matelli’s hyper-realistic patinated bronze sculptures of white tulips on a plinth and weeds sprouting from the area the place the wall meets the ground are drawing crowds.

Throughout the honest, nature is in and tech is out—although the sector’s affect is felt in different methods. “Quite a few leaders from main tech firms attended,” Blumenkranz says of the preview gala, including that their presence has grow to be “anticipated now, which is so precious to our arts neighborhood”.

The overwhelming majority of Fog’s taking part galleries have opted to supply guests from Silicon Valley and elsewhere a preponderance of pure imagery, natural supplies and conventional crafts over digital works. Nearly each stand, each of design and artwork galleries, options works in wooden, ceramic or textiles—generally all three.

Highlights of this materially wealthy cohort embrace a wall-sized textile set up by Lehuauakea at Catherine Clark Gallery, which has bought to a US museum for $225,000, and recent ceramic works like Krzysztof Strzelecki’s urinal painted with homoerotic imagery (on Anat Ebgi Gallery’s stand) and Alma Berrow’s mirrored ashtrays plagued by cigarettes in numerous states of wastage (exhibiting with Megan Mulrooney). All three of the above are within the Fog Focus sector, an initiative devoted to shows of rising artists that has practically doubled in measurement from final 12 months. As a substitute of conventional three-walled stands, the sector’s floorplan is open, giving Pier 2 a extra infectious power.

Jonathan Carver Moore, the director of the eponymous San Francisco gallery, which has participated within the Focus sector for the previous three years, says the San Francisco neighborhood actually confirmed up for the honest this 12 months. “Individuals handled it like a civic obligation,” he says. “With politics being what they’re, and with the sudden closure of the California Faculty of the Arts, everyone seems to be doubling down on supporting the humanities.” Moore’s presentation is a part of the large-scale canvas development, with epic work by Sesse Elangwe that the artist made throughout a residency on the gallery.

The Focus sector additionally contains shows that bother the excellence between artwork and design objects. Blunk House, primarily based in Level Reyes Station, is exhibiting handmade salvaged wooden chairs by the Japanese Austrian maker Rio Kobayashi alongside summary work by the late sculptor J.B. Blunk’s friends like Richard Bowman and candlesticks by up to date artists like Maryam Yousif and Dan John Anderson. And on the stand of Los Angeles-based gallery Marta, Minjae Kim’s sculptural fibreglass and brass lamps illuminate Dominik Tarabański’s chiaroscuro prints of botanical nonetheless lifes. Maybe that is the place Fog Design+Artwork is at its finest: when it’s difficult staid hierarchies and blurring the traces between fantastic artwork, craft and design.

Fog Design+Artwork, till 25 January, Fort Mason piers 2 and three, San Francisco