Since moving to Northern California twenty years ago, Werfel has continually enlarged the scope of her paintings, combining images from multiple sources. Reflecting on David Hockney’s observation that we see “not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world,” she’s developed strategies for weaving fragmentary materials, including collage and stencils, into overall compositions. Her current paintings create a shallow space in which graphic marks exist in tension with naturalistic gestures that fade in and out of focus.

This body of work includes paintings made for the show’s original date in 2020, now combined with others produced during the pandemic; the title alludes to the expanded, open-ended context afforded by this disruption of Werfel’s original trajectory, as well as to the interwoven textures of her paintings.

Gina Werfel is an American abstract painter who uses vivid color, gesture, and complex compositional structures to create dynamic and rhythmic visual expressions.

Werfel works with a mixture of oils, acrylics, and mixed media on canvas. Her background is in landscape painting, which helped her to develop a keen eye for light, color relationships, and compositional harmony. As she transitioned into abstraction, she developed her ability to use those sensibilities to convey complex and nuanced emotional states.

In her abstract paintings, she employs expressionist, open gestures to create bursts of movement and energy. Her color choices create a range of tones, from the muted and serene to the vibrant and electric. In addition to traditional brushwork, she also incorporates mediums like spray-paint and stencils to build complex layers that draw the viewer in, inviting exploration and discovery.