present — House Of Seiko

Quintessa Matranga

Water Sign

May 11 - June 15, 2025

Opening reception:

Sunday, May 11, 2025
12:00 - 3:00 pm

Inquiries: cole@houseofseiko.info

We are thrilled to announce our inaugural exhibition of new work by California-based painter, Quintessa Matranga.

Quintessa Matranga (b. 1989, New York) moved back to San Francisco in 2020 after spending a formative period working and exhibiting in New York. The artist’s return to her former homebase prompted a gradual reappraisal of her relationship to painting, as she was no longer contending with the self-set demands of operating in the crowded field of the New York art world and could begin to think more autonomously about what compelled her toward painting to begin with.

Previously known for creating mostly conceptual paintings exploring humor and personal narrative content, Matranga’s works now reveal a painterly core and pictorial language that reflects her day-to-day life more than anything else. The images have become more lyrical than conceptual, more humanist than ironic. Matranga’s paintings now reach for the ecumenical (i.e. the general and inclusive) rather than the singular statement.

The title of the exhibition––Water Sign––was partly inspired by an article Matranga’s friend, the artist Dan Graham (1944–2022) wrote and later sent to her about the architect John Lautner, recognizing the architect as a cancerian, like Matranga, who incorporated water in the center of his designs. Like Lautner’s work, Matranga’s paintings are also water signs. They take us close to the water, and closer to the substance of painting (in this case works executed with a water-based acrylic medium). At the center of her latest paintings is a relaxed sense of making art as a part of everyday life––finding compelling, unexpected images in her daily activities that would be impossible to conceptualize cerebrally.

One image in particular has become a recurring focus for the artist: two young men on the shore of the Russian River looking on as ducklings go about their business. It’s a non-moment maybe, but one that is perfect for Matranga’s painterly research. Leisurely moments, both idealized and real, are held in tension with an almost brooding sense of concreteness and tactile reality. Forms are depersonalized and abstracted; specificity is blurred and what emerges is a more open-ended pictorial experience.

Quintessa Matranga has been the subject of solo exhibitions at What Pipeline, Detroit (2022, 2019), Sandy Brown, Berlin (2018), Freddy, Harris (2017), and Queer Thoughts, New York (2017). Selected group exhibitions include TOKAS, Tokyo (2020), Bureau, New York (2020) Carlos Ishikawa, London (2018), Karma International, Los Angeles (2017), Pilar Corias, London (2017), and Et. al, San Francisco (2016).

Anthony Atlas