Exhibition: Inez Storer, Nancy Koenigsberg, and Bankemper Collab

Inez Storer
Keeping My Head Above Water

Inez Storer, a well-known figure in the BayArea, has her first New York solo at Nancy Hoffman. Born in 1933 in Santa Monica, California, to parents who fled Germany as Hitler was rising to power. In the late 1920’s, her parents became involved in the burgeoning Hollywood film industry, which influenced the artist, who now lives in Point Reyes, northwest of San Francisco. Storer’s work does not fit tidily into any movement. She has been called a “Story Painter,” a label she shares with a few other Bay Area artists. We enter into her works of magical realism, worlds she invents, finding familiar characters and strangers, recognizable iconic images. Most of the paintings incorporate some text. Storer’s interesting life is mingled with postcards, pictures, old letters and bits of text she has been collecting forever.

Nancy Koenigsberg
CHROMA

Nancy Koenigsberg shows her magnum opus from 2023. She worked on CHROMA, her own version of a painter’s palate of color, for over six months. This sculptural wall piece of coated colored copper wire commands a wall and draws viewers into a rainbow of colors; four rows of small squares horizontally, and four rows vertically, 36 inches square. Each color square is created by knotting and manipulating coated copper wire and building up layers of the color to create a 2 inch deep object. The material is shiny and dull, fragile, and industrial strength, the colors create a grid not unrelated to her more subdued grids in greys and blacks, inspired by city streets.

Bankemper collab

Each of the collab Bankemper team works on a specific aspect of their ceramic sculptures: Sophie creates the biomorphic forms, more interested in their sculptural shapes and character than in creating a vessel. She hand-builds the sculptural forms intuitively, some of which make reference to the human body, providing her Mother, Joan, with richly varied surfaces on which to work. Joan creates the skin, the color, the handwriting that gives each work its distinction. Tiny porcelain flowers adorn it, along with clay circles of all shapes and sizes in pale silvery gray. There is a contrapunto energy between the delicate flower beds, the variegated shapes and sizes of circles, and the rugged green grout suggesting a garden, and the somewhat (intentionally) unrefined asymmetrical shape.