Big Feelings: Figures and Faces in Nathan Oliveira, Koak, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Gregory Rick

Nathan Oliveira, one of the central figures of the Bay Area Figurative movement and an integral member of the Palo Alto artistic community, is best known for his compositions in which abstracted, attenuated figures appear isolated in ambiguous, void-like spaces. The artist’s use of figuration often conveyed his own state of mind and mental health. In the difficult periods of his life, Oliveira embraced the expressionistic power of darkness, his figures emerging from shadows, while in more joyous times, he utilized warm, rich color palettes and exultant poses.

From the 1960s to 2010, Oliveira created a vast body of work, including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, as well as lithography, monotype, and etching. Big Feelings places this work in conversation with that of his Bay Area contemporaries and successors, including Lynn Hershman Leeson, Koak, and Gregory Rick, with a particular emphasis on the artists’ emotional and psychological well-being as a driving motivator behind their art making. While addressing complex feelings arising from solitude and existential contemplation, the exhibition also delves into moments of elation and the ecstatic, looking carefully at the artists’ formal and expressionistic decisions as a vehicle for emotional communication.

In the 1960s, while pregnant, Hershman Leeson was hospitalized for cardiomyopathy, and was so ill she was on oxygen. Her works on paper and sculpture, created during this time, reflect her sense of isolation, as well as her emphasis on the mechanics of the human body, and the connection between physical and mental health.

Koak’s delicate, figurative scenes, set in liminal spaces, allow emotional expression to take center stage. Drawing on her background in comics, she presents difficult, conflicting emotions with optimism and humor, encouraging her viewers to consider the complexity of their own emotional states.

Gregory Rick creates layered compositions that combine narrative with memory, weaving together his military service, family history, and broader historical moments, and using color and gesture as a means of psychological processing and catharsis.

Big Feelings brings this stylistically and conceptually diverse group of artists into conversation, illuminating what is shared in the human condition.

Big Feelings: Figures and Faces in Nathan Oliveira, Koak, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Gregory Rick is curated by Morgann Trumbull.