Aaron Sheppard | Anthony Liggins | Christy Hopkins | Diane Holland | Haleh Mashian | Thomas Piekunka | Tina Bluefield | Belén Senra
Press Release
BY HAND & BY HEART
A Summer Group Exhibition
MASH Gallery, West Hollywood | 812 N La Cienega Blvd
July 25th – August 22nd, 2026
There is a question that has shadowed Western art since at least 1948, when Clement Greenberg declared the flatness of the picture plane the defining condition of modern painting, arguing that serious painting was painting honest about its own nature, a surface that refused to pretend it was a window into another world. Pollock qualified because his drips sat on top of the canvas rather than disappearing into illusion. Frankenthaler qualified because her stained color fields soaked into the weave and went no further. The logic was rigorous, and for two decades it was law. The artists in By Hand & By Heart inherit that argument and detonate it from the inside, because when paint leaves the canvas entirely and hangs in three-dimensional space, when fiber becomes architecture, when a surface is built inch by inch into something closer to relief than picture, the question of flatness becomes not a condition but a provocation. These eight artists don't answer Greenberg. They make him beside the point.
MASH Gallery presents By Hand & By Heart, a summer group exhibition bringing together eight artists across painting, mixed media, fiber, and sculptural installation. They span continents and generations. They work in oil, acrylic, wool, found objects, eucalyptus fiber, resin, gold leaf, and suspended strands of liberated paint. What holds them together is a conviction that runs deeper than medium or geography: that the physical act of making carries a kind of meaning that no other process can replicate. In an era of frictionless digital production, that conviction feels less like a stylistic preference and more like a position.
The exhibition takes its organizing principle from the hand. Every surface here was built through direct physical contact, through pressure and repetition and time. Color and texture are not decorative choices. They are structural ones.
THE ARTISTS
Tina Bluefield (California) draws from the example of Agnes Martin and Richard Diebenkorn, artists who proved that restraint, taken far enough, becomes its own form of intensity. Her hard-edge oil compositions treat color as atmosphere rather than pigment, with hand-drawn grids moving across saturated fields. The geometry never contains the color; it simply marks out a structure for something that resists being measured. At large scale, her paintings stop functioning as objects to read and become spaces to inhabit.
Anthony Liggins (Miami) extends the physical urgency of the Abstract Expressionists through the rhythms of music, dance, and the spiritual traditions of the African diaspora. Layered gestures, dreamlike color fields, and sharp passages of geometry combine into canvases that read as much like a musical score as a painting. His work has entered the collections of many institutions and private collectors worldwide, including the Smithsonian, and his practice insists, against a long history equating seriousness with austerity, that joy can be a legitimate and rigorous mode of art-making.
Christy Hopkins (Seattle) continues a line of painting that Joan Mitchell established, one that refuses to separate feeling from form or the body's motion from the image it leaves behind. She works without a plan, on unstretched canvas laid on the floor or pinned to the wall, building up five to ten layers of acrylic until the surface reaches what she calls a state of aliveness. Each layer responds to the one before it. What results are paintings that are dense, kinetic, and warm: less illustrations of emotion than emotion given physical form.
Diane Holland (San Francisco) studied under Corita Kent at Immaculate Heart College, an education that fused the visual language of Pop Art with political urgency and moral seriousness, and that fusion still shapes her work today. She layers paint, collage, photography, handwritten text, musical notation, and printed ephemera into dense fields that function at once as archive and as painting. Her project reclaims a slur once used against the German Expressionists, turning a label meant to diminish into a statement of vitality and resistance.
Thomas Piekunka (Los Angeles) reached his breakthrough by asking a question no painter before him had quite posed: what if the canvas itself is the limitation? Drawing on the conceptual inheritance of post-minimalism and the material and spatial ambitions of Eva Hesse, he spent thirty-five years developing a method that removes paint from the picture plane entirely, suspending it in three-dimensional space as hundreds of individual strands. What emerges is neither painting nor sculpture, but something the history of art has no precise name for.
Aaron Sheppard (Joshua Tree, CA) is among the most transgressive artists working in Southern California today. His references range freely: Rodin and William Blake, mythology and pornography, classical allegorical portraiture and the neon grit of Las Vegas. The resulting assemblages and mixed-media paintings are raw, densely encoded, and physically insistent, forcing a confrontation with the object itself rather than offering a comfortable idea about it. He treats the body not as a subject but as a site of argument, holding questions of identity, desire, and cultural mythology in tension that never fully resolves. His work rewards a viewer willing to stay with it.
Belén Senra (Spain) works within a tradition that contemporary art is only now fully recognizing, the lineage of fiber artists like Sheila Hicks, who insisted that woven and tufted work belongs in the realm of art rather than craft. Her large-scale, hand-tufted installations in wool, eucalyptus fiber, bamboo, and eco cotton are monumental in scale yet built inch by inch, a contradiction that sits at the center of the work. Fourteen years of nomadic life across six continents shaped her understanding of how texture carries emotional memory across cultures, and how touch, as she puts it, is our most honest sense. In the gallery, her work registers not as decoration but as presence.
Haleh Mashian (Los Angeles) Haleh Mashian, founder of MASH Gallery and a Los Angeles-based painter working within Contemporary Abstract Expressionism, creates richly layered works that blur the boundary between painting and sculpture. Like Anselm Kiefer, whose material-driven surfaces transformed painting into a physical carrier of meaning, Mashian treats the canvas as more than an image-bearing support. Through the accumulation of texture, depth, and dimensional form, her works become objects with a palpable presence, where materiality functions as an integral component of the work’s conceptual foundation.
Across her Butterfly, Tree, Water, Rose, and Figurative series, materiality serves as an extension of concept. Surfaces are built, excavated, and transformed to reinforce themes of resilience, memory, growth, and metamorphosis.
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By Hand & By Heart opens July 25th and runs through August 22nd, 2026. MASH Gallery is located at 812 N La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm, and by appointment.
