Ann Gale, Professor and Chair of Painting + Drawing, had an exhibition of new work at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco from October 2 through November 1, 2025. Gale paints her human subjects not as fixed entities, but as sites of ongoing experience. Her canvases gather time, compressing shifts in light, posture, and perspective into portraits set in motion. Each painting is a study in simultaneity, where the body is both precisely rendered and dissolved in time.
The artist’s relationship to her subjects is sustained and deeply felt. She returns to the same people over years, allowing the arc of their lives to unfold in paint. These are not fleeting encounters but evolving collaborations. “There is always something that makes me want to paint someone again,” she observes. What compels her is a sense of both presence and the human condition: our fragility, our strength, and the quiet resilience of living in a body, alone and separate from each other.
Gale’s distinctive style—patches of paint of varying size, shifting chromatic fields, and planes of light—does not obscure her sitters but reveals them more fully. Faces are rendered in greater detail, but even here, the eyes often evade us. They blur or disappear, as if resisting the finality of being known. Movement and time enter the frame: a head tilts, an arm twists, light changes. Gale holds onto each of these moments without covering them up or resolving them as she negotiates between the optical and the emotional.
Figures in her paintings are shaped as much by what surrounds them as by their internal state, with the physical environment becoming a stand-in for the emotional one. “A figure in a painting is absorbed by things around them, eaten up and carved around,” she says. The background becomes a kind of echo chamber for the body’s solitude and inner life. This sensitivity to atmosphere extends to Gale’s self-portraits, in which she situates herself amid abstract marks and shifting space. There is no firm boundary between self and surroundings, no hard line separating feeling from observation.
Ultimately, Gale’s work offers a profound meditation on what it means to see and be seen. Her paintings ask us to meet her subjects not with certainty, but with attention. To witness their presence the way she does: slowly, physically, and with care.
Ann Gale was born in 1966 and earned her BFA from Rhode Island College and MFA from Yale University. In addition to exhibiting across North America, Gale is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, a Washington Arts Council Fellowship in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1996, among others. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Academy of Art and Design, New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon; and the Tucson Museum of Art. This is her fourth solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.
View details of the exhibition on Dolby Chadwick Gallery's webpage.
Learn more about the exhibition from this press release.