MATRIX 290 / Keka Enriquez

MATRIX 290 / Keka Enriquez is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. After a successful painting career in the Philippines, Enriquez (b. 1962, Manila) moved to the Bay Area in 1998 and began working as a recreational therapist at a hospital in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. She continues to work there today. In 2023, Enriquez started painting again for the first time in more than 20 years, making bold, expressionist canvases that incorporate historical and contemporary references, abstract and figurative forms, and evince an exuberant love of paint. Organized in collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts, where Enriquez was a 2026 artist-in-residence, this exhibition marks Enriquez’s return to the contemporary art world and highlights the radical experimentation of an artist who has for decades contributed to the vitality of the arts and artistic expression through everyday acts of community and care.

The satellite show at Headlands Center for the Arts presents additional paintings from Enriquez’s same body of work.

During a twelve-week Headlands residency in early 2026, organized in partnership with BAMPFA, Enriquez created a series of large-scale paintings that move restlessly between abstraction and figuration. Built from layered passages of color, line, texture, and form, the works engage familiar mythologies of the American West while bringing into view histories that have often been marginalized from official accounts. Several paintings draw on the artist’s archival and place-based research, including a visit to the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of Chinese and other Asian immigrants were detained under exclusionary US immigration policies. Through painting, Enriquez revisits these histories through the lens of her own experiences of migration, displacement, and memory.

The Headlands presentation expands upon the BAMPFA exhibition, offering audiences the opportunity to encounter Enriquez’s new paintings in the artist-centered environment where the work was developed. Together, the two presentations offer complementary perspectives on Enriquez’s return to painting and extend the collaboration between BAMPFA and Headlands.

MATRIX 290 / Keka Enriquez at BAMPFA is curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator. The exhibition at BAMPFA runs from December 2, 2026 to April 25, 2027.