Summer/Selections

San Francisco’s Ratio 3 Gallery commemorates the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of Margaret Kilgallen with Summer/Selections, a show of some fifty of her works. Located on a decidedly ungentrified Mission district alley, the gallery is an appropriate match for Kilgallen’s rough-hewn aesthetic, down to its ancient uneven floor beams and DIY architecture. In the gallery’s front room hang forty-one framed paintings on funky non-archival paper, usually torn from notebooks or sketchbooks, and often yellowed at the edges. Each painting—untitled, like all the works in the show—is resonant with a painful beauty. Think of a finger depressing one piano key to form a perfect isolated and reverberating note. Think of that same finger pushing against the chest above the heart. 

Ranging from some two-by-five inches to as much as eleven-by-seventeen inches, the paintings usually depict one image: a plant, a tree, two leaves, a woman, two women, a man. Four are studies: taxonomies of boots, lips, shoes, disembodied women’s hairdos. They’re mannered and immediately identifiable as Kilgallen’s. They are complete thoughts but also serve as documentation of research by the artist’s hand. Images recur as she meditates on their meaning and the variety of ways they can be represented. A few are abstract patterns of dots, or virtually abstract studies of waves and rain. There’s empty ground behind these figures. They’re almost always monochromatic in Kilgallen’s typical strong palette of greens, browns, and reddish-oranges. Her works refer to illustration, typology, and design as sources that are honored while being transcended.

I’ve watched an artist such as Kilgallen’s contemporary, Vincent Fecteau, in the studio; he can debate with himself for weeks on the precise angle of one plane in a small sculpture. For Kilgallen, each painted image is meticulously delivered

Untitled, c. 2000; acrylic on paper; 13.75 x 21 in. Courtesy of the Artist’s estate and Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco.

Untitled, c. 2000; acrylic on paper; 7.25 x 4.75 in. Courtesy of the Artist’s estate and Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco.

with the same scrutiny. A three-inch-tall green summary of a tree bends with yogic grace. A leaf evokes its individuality the way only something alive can. Part of the poignancy of these works is that they are at once comic portraits and profound selected aspects of the world that contain the whole world within their particularity.

Five larger and unframed pieces are on view in the smaller back room. In a couple of these pieces Kilgallen explored quilting together fragments of other works. In one we see tiny slices of undecipherable texts; in another there is a large color field with a small black smudge, which may be a cloud, in one corner. These precious remnants are transitional, still experimental, and ultimately marginal examples of her work. The two highlights of the group include one piece with a small passenger jet and a bike messenger, tying together heavenly and earthbound transportation. The other, the only really dark piece in the exhibition, depicts a lizard dog chomping on a human arm and a gas heater emitting an ominous white cloud. In contrast to those images of worldly peril is a redwood tree regenerating itself, as redwoods do, with feisty sprigs emerging from a trunk cut down before its time.

Summer/Selections is on view at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, through August 5, 2011.