This November, TAG Artists reinvigorate landscapes, still life, and abstraction – transforming expected narratives into surprising terrain.
Joe Pinkelman’s Cairns are vessels fragmented, separated, and tethered together into new configurations; Robert Zent Chew’s pushes California Impressionist landscapes toward abstraction, moving through desert, coastal, tropical, and color-field compositions; Barbara Danzi’s handmade quilts are printed, dyed, and stitched into one of a kind works; Angélique Glennon pairs handmade jewelry with painting, transforming both materials and meaning; Gina Leon-Gutiélrrez weaves family and memory into still-life paintings; a tribute to Liliana D’Ambrosio celebrates a life in art through a retrospective of abstract works charged with global, feminist, and political resonance; and David Stewart Kleincreates dialogue between negative space and gesture in painting, a spiritual quest to capture “the hidden current” of life.
Together, these exhibitions move between fragmentation and wholeness, the familiar and the transformed, the personal and the collective—revealing how artists can shift perception through material, memory, and imagination.
EXHIBITION DATES: Wednesday, October 28 – Friday, November 20, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, November 7, 5 – 8 PM
FIBER ARTISTS TALK (Barbara Danzi): Sunday, November 8, 3 – 4 PM
GROUP SHOW:
Featuring TAG ARTISTS, in the SKY GALLERY at TAG – Magical Darkness considers the space beyond what is immediately visible, where darkness gives the imagination room to wander. Darkness is a space charged with mystery, spook, fantasy, and magic. TAG Artists feature works in all mediums with varied interpretations.
FEATURED SOLO ARTISTS:
Robert Zent Chew is known for his landscapes based on California impressionism, but in this exhibition he experiments with transitioning to more abstract views of desert, coastal, tropical, and color-field compositions.
Robert Zent Chew is an American artist, born in the Midwest and living in Palm Desert, Calif. He is best known for his abstracted landscapes and abstracted florals, which have been shown in galleries, museums, and are part of many private collections. In Southern California, Chew is represented by the Desert Artists Gallery, Palm Desert, and The Artists Gallery, Los Angeles. Worldwide, the artist is part of the SaatchiArt Online and was named one of its featured artists by SaatchiArt curator Rebecca Wilson.
Transitions: From Impressionism to Abstraction
Robert Zent Chew’s work strikes a balance between representational and abstracted/deconstructed landscapes, and still life compositions. He focuses on mood and feeling to express the core elements of a subject. In many cases his work attempts to make the viewer feel as if they are part of the landscape, whether fully abstracted or with elements of realism. His work often features heavy layering of oil and rapid, loose brushwork that adds dynamism. Working off a palette based in California Impressionism, Chew creates colors and textures, and uses tonalist brush techniques, that are as distinctive as his subject matter, which often is the invisible yet readily recognizable scenes of everyday life. These scenes range from freeway passes to coastal beaches to aerial views of urban/industrial landscapes.
A Tribute to Liliana D’Ambrosio: A Woman in Art
Liliana was a talented painter – an extraordinary woman. Her sense of autonomy was tribute to strong will and stubbornness. She lived life at the pulse of passion – in her personal and artistic endeavors. The leitmotif of this exhibition is painting – a rebirth of Liliana through her work. This exhibition serves as a tribute to Liliana, months after she left us, but also as encouragement for all of us – to the youngest and oldest – not to give in to difficulties, but rather, to dare, to dream, to believe in their abilities.
Liliana D’Ambrosio’s contribution to contemporary art lies in her fearless exploration of abstract expressionism as a vehicle for feminist and personal narratives. Her works, informed by her activism and global experiences, offer a rich tapestry of color and meaning that transcends cultural boundaries. Through her art, D’Ambrosio invites us to experience the evolving nature of identity, memory, and freedom, making her a significant voice in the modern art landscape.
A Woman in Art Tribute to Liliana D’Ambrosio 1986 to 2026
The retrospective represents life – globally- tormented by wars, by the unequal distribution of the resources it produces, shameful pockets of poverty in a world that claims to be civil. It explores the torment of natural catastrophes due to unstoppable global warming, from the advance of technologies to artificial intelligence.
Lilian D’Ambrosio:
“My language is not made up of words or sentences but of painting as an expression of myself. Mine is a journey between Chaos, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change and Inequalities, moving from abstraction to more daring avant-garde concepts.
For this reason, I ask that you look at my works of art not just by what I am trying to express, but leaving you the space to interpret them yourselves.
My existence has always been intertwined with social problems, being a feminist, my observations of poverty, immigration, homosexuality, climate change and the protection of planet Earth, while always aiming to defend the weakest .”
Printed, Dyed and Stitched is part of Handwork 2026, Craft in America’s nationwide semiquincentennial collaboration showcasing the importance of the handmade and celebrating the diversity of craft that defines America. The exhibition showcases new quilts by Barbara Danzi, created with silk screens and other printing tools and techniques, thickened fiber-reactive dyes, and indigo dye. After printing and dyeing the fabric, it’s layered and stitched with quilted lines that add additional meaning or context to the dyed compositions. Barbara’s methods are improvisational, resulting in one of a kind fiber art pieces for the wall.
Barbara Danzi is a Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles–based textile artist whose colorful abstract quilts investigate the relationship between human-built systems and the natural environment.
Working improvisationally, she hand-cuts solid-colored fabric with gestural movements and stitches the pieces together so that the seam lines function as organic, hand-drawn marks.
With an Engineering degree from Cornell University, Danzi brings a systems-based sensibility to her studio practice while embracing intuition and improvisation in the construction of each work. She has studied extensively with master contemporary quilt artist Nancy Crow. Danzi’s quilts have been exhibited internationally across four continents and have received numerous awards, including Outstanding Abstract Design and Best in Show.
My work grows out of daily life. As I move through the world, something I see, hear, or encounter can spontaneously trigger a transformation in my mind. Ordinary materials, objects, places, sounds, and imagery become possibilities for an art form. I am drawn both to transforming unexpected materials and to aerial views, particularly those revealing human civilization and activity from above. Reduced to miniature scale, these worlds become something we can visually contain, creating a deeply satisfying sense of discovery and even a subtle sense of power.
Newelry™ is an innovative concept that brings conceptual jewelry and painting together in three-dimensional works. Its subjects can range from aerial views of beaches, golf courses, and floating markets to explorations of unexpected materials and familiar objects transformed into something entirely different. The jewelry, designed for exceptional wear, is integrated into a matching oil painting and can be detached from the artwork. Until that is revealed, the viewer may not even realize that jewelry is present. This element of surprise allows Newelry™ to transcend conventional associations with jewelry, broadening its appeal as a work of art.
Playfulness and humor are essential to my work, alongside craftsmanship, complexity, and the unexpected. Newelry™ continues to evolve, with increasingly complex works, that can move beyond the painting into sculptural forms while remaining jewelry. There is always another transformation waiting to happen.
Angélique Glennon is a French multidisciplinary artist based in Santa Monica, California. Growing up in France, she learned to sew from her mother and began applying those skills to making her own jewelry as a teenager. In the 1980s, while studying drawing and painting, she created unconventional jewelry from left-behind telephone wires and broken guitar strings, leading to her first business in France. After moving to the United States in 1988, she continued developingher work across painting, sculpture, design, and jewelry. In 2021, two previously separate paths—jewelry and painting—came together, eventually leading to Newelry™. She is a member artist at TAG Gallery in Los Angeles.
Joe Pinkelman’s newest body of work deepens his long standing investigation into how form, pattern, and fragmentation shape meaning. In Divisions, Pinkelman examines how separate elements relate to one another when they are split, bisected, or interrupted. Each piece plays with the tension between fragmentation and unity: forms are cut apart, metaphorically broken, yet still tethered to one another in ways that create a new, composite whole.
In Black on White, he turns to the visual language of black and white pottery, using its familiar vessel silhouettes to explore sexual positions as abstracted sculptural configurations.
The Cairns are stacked, balanced shapes, that echo the cairns found in landscapes across the world, but here they are filtered through an art historical lens. Influenced by Cézanne’s insistence that all forms can be understood as cylinders, cubes, and spheres, Pinkelman distills the cairn into elemental geometry.
Joe Pinkelman is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice centers on the interplay between fragmentation and reconstruction. He earned his BFA from Colorado State University and his MFA in ceramics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he began developing the formal strategies that continue to define his work today. Pinkelman consistently engages pattern as both decoration and conceptual device. Repetition, interruption, and recombination appear throughout his pieces, creating surfaces and structures that feel simultaneously ordered and disrupted. His work has been exhibited widely, and more of his projects can be found at joepinkelman.com as well as on Instagram at @joepinkelman.
David Stewart Klein presents his seventh solo exhibition, The Flow: Into the Light. After three years of artistic exploration and traveling the world through artistic endeavors both visual and aural, Klein has come to a more spiritually focused body of work, allowing negative space and very intentional gestures to create a wholistic narrative between all pieces, in contrast to his former approach of creating a curation of independently strong, intense pieces of art that form a themed collection. The Flow represents a 10+ year navigation of compositional structure and intense emotion, now coming together to form a deeply personal narrative between works, yet allowing “the hidden current” of life itself to be the driving force of the work. Space….breath.
David Stewart Klein is an award winning Fine Artist/illustrator and multi- instrumentalist/composer living and working internationally with his production studio “The Art of Dekay Studio and Gallery” currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Klein’s career in Fine Art has spanned 15 years, in which time he has created 8.5 ambitious and thought-provoking themed solo exhibitions, and participated in 150+ group exhibitions. Klein has exhibited his work in 6 countries including the US, UK, France, Greece, Italy and Spain and can be found in institutions such as museums, hospitals, galleries and in public and private collections internationally.
What We Place Here begins with the understanding that objects and plants are not neutral. The way they inhabit domestic space – how they are placed, arranged, tended or overlooked- holds meaning, reflecting patterns of care, memory and daily life. It’s a small constellation in your home.
I have painted still life situated in familial interior spaces. The work is drawn from photographs captured by family members spread across the globe, with aspiration to bridge geographical distance. There is resemblance in these spaces, objects, still life narratives – as if the hand of family has swept through our homes and tied together a shared language of color, an appreciation for hand – made, a instinct for crowded but artful arrangement of tchotchkes, a beloved grandpa’s sculpture or painting here and there – a related sense of home.
Gina Leon – Gutierrez is an artist, mural painter, and arts educator. Born in South Africa, raised in Canada, she is now based in Los Angeles, California, where she works as a visual artist, mural painter and actress.
She studied Theatre and Art history at the University of Toronto, Visual Art at the College of Art and Design in Sydney Australia, Acting at the New School for Drama in New York City. She trained at the Social and Public Art Resource Center under renowned muralist Judith F. Baca, deepening her interest in public art and social justice monument-making. Her paintings and murals have been showcased in Vancouver, New York City, and Los Angeles – exploring narratives about connection, memory and resilience.
Her interdisciplinary background in theatre, visual arts, community-based practice, and arts education informs her exploration of how stories are constructed, remembered, and reimagined.
