“Picture space, no matter the medium, is otherworldly by nature. It purports to dissolve the membrane between this world and some adjacent dimension. In our image-drowned age, only art as strange and apparently subdued as that of Bay Area painter Frances Lerner may remind us of this.”

Kenneth Baker, Art critic, San Francisco Chronicle

Featured In San Francisco Art Week

Recent Work

Past Shows / Work

Poke
In my first memories of making art, I am at my aunt’s house in Cleveland: making little poke-marks on the wall and braiding the fringe on her brocade sofa. Decades later, here I am: still marking up surfaces and playing with fabric. Almost all the work was done by poking a single needle into bits and pieces of felt, a process that causes me to marvel as hundreds of tiny holes gather to create a whole…

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After All
After All surveys the past decade of Lerner’s work from four series, which are not displayed chronologically or thematically. Despite the stylistic differences, and the time-tripping into which viewers find themselves, the effect is not as jarring as mught have been expected Lerner’s compelling and consistent sensibility links everything, so the effect is less cacophonous than dialogic; the sibling works speak to each other…

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Unlikely Companions
My current work both abandons and embraces premises of the two previous series shown in the last six years – (There Was Once A World and Sympathetic Criminals) – which took for inspiration a perplexed puppet named Lorelei. The puppet, her family, and her compadres in industrial dioramas formed a traditional still life set up…

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Minor Characters and Sympathetic Criminals
Combining old master techniques but with ramshackle content I will try to re-invent notion of Still and Not So Still Lives from the characters in the studio warehouse complex called the Giant Trade Center in San Pablo and have it open as an off-site exhibition…

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There Once Was a World
The central characters I use in my small paintings are based on a Lorelei, a Japanese puppet I bought at a flea market and her French puppet husband. Later, I bought their child on eBay — a diminutive creature with the same spout mouth…

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