Continuing through October 10, 2026
Given the churning clouds of anxiety under which we now live, nostalgia is easy to understand. But is it possible to be nostalgic about nostalgia itself? This question is explored by the two artists featured in this exhibition, both haunted by the forlornness of the now. For Stefan Kürten and Sarah M. Newton, aspects of the past are more vivid than the experience of the present, undercutting if not outright mocking any aspiration for a utopian future. That is because the now is revealed to be nothing more than the most recent version of the many possible futures that the passage of time heaps upon one another. If we were ever tempted to resist the laws of historical determinism, nostalgia reminds that time runs out, meaning that those laws always end up winning over and over again.
The paintings of Kürten’s “Echoes from the Past” have an archeological look to them, depicting the partially excavated ruins of an ancient civilization that, when you look closely, appears to be our own, sort of. They also look like relics because of their agitated surfaces and grim, twilit colorations. In “Abandoned Certainties” (2026) a mid-century house is set amidst overgrown trees and other unkempt foliage. Nocturnal illumination prevails here, but there are no stars in the sky, only a brownish fog reflecting available light back toward the viewer. Subdued acrylic paint is applied to a wooden surface that was cut into as if it were intended to be a woodcut, then later turned into a tonalist painting featuring terse, unsaccharin colors.
Other paintings focus on well-known buildings. “Twilight Zone” (2015) shows the White House looking as if it had been abandoned, while another “Untitled” work (2026 shows the New York Stock exchange sinking into a rising tide of brackish water). Two small paintings, “Ghost Palace” (2025) and “Past Perfect” (2026) depict the crumbling remains of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts as if half of the ornate building had collapsed due to the ravages of time. Despite their evocation of a fallen empire, these are among the most colorful paintings in the exhibition, which otherwise tend toward the somber and the elegiac.
Among the three largest works here, “Everybody Hurts” (2009) is moody and elegiac in tone, but less specific in its subject matter, a residence enclosed within a white picket fence. Cascading layers of image fragments fall just short of telling a story for the sake of evoking the sedimentation of time. A common thread between the older and new works is the way that Kürten uses yellow ocher as a highlight color balanced against grey violet mixed with dark green for shadows, conveying the effect of a patina on the works’ surfaces.
Using very different materials, Sarah M. Newton also explores the forlornness of the now. At first glance, the nine works on paper appear to be overexposed photographs of richly detailed scenes where civil engineering gives way to the outskirts of nature. In fact, these exquisitely executed works are executed in ink, gouache and chalk on either grey or coffee colored paper, always looking like ghostly apparitions. “Interruptions in the Bay Trail” focuses on an incomplete hiking trail that was once intended to encircle the San Francisco Bay.
The trail itself features many postcard views of the Bay, but Newton’s works forsake those views for other less glamorous sites, such as “Cavallo Point, Fort Baker (elev. 37 ft.)” (2025) and “Richmond San Rafael Bridge (elev. 36 ft.)” (2026), that take their cue from Robert Smithson’s explorations of Passaic, New Jersey. In other words, her works depict such things as the underside of bridges or dilapidated boat ramps that have fallen into disuse. As is the case with Kürten’s paintings, Newton’s works also meditate on the folly and impermanence of those things that would aspire to resist entropy, doing so with a subtle and delicate touch that charms the eye.
