LewAllen Galleries will open the exhibition Nathan Oliveira: Bay area existentialist, featuring important examples of key works spanning five decades of the late well-known Bay Area artist’s career. This exhibition is a prelude to a major celebratory exhibition in 2028 planned at LewAllen for the centennial of the artist’s birth. As a preview, the works in this first exhibition survey important examples from Oliveira’s artistic practice, ranging from early, heavily textured portraiture to classic abstracted images of the full human figure, as well as later works featuring subjects such as antlers, bones and birds.

Nathan Oliveira (1928-2010) is regarded today as one of America’s great masters of extracting profound meaning through a pictorial practice that converged elements of Abstract Expressionism with the figure in confronting the vexing existential complexities of man’s engagement with the uncertainties of a post-World War II environment. His reductive aesthetic that privileged painterly gesture as a primary means of expression to open the viewer’s perception is acclaimed for infusing deeply passionate impressions of modern anxieties, doubts and despairs – but also hopes for redemption in their midst. The authenticity of these expressive imprints are so engaging they elicit the viewer’s own imaginings about existence and the human condition in this world.

The exhibition will be on view from July 3 through August 1, 2026.