SHIFT—Five Decades of Contemporary California Painting

SHIFT—Five Decades of Contemporary California Painting is an exhibition organized by the Monterey Museum of Art in celebration of the Museum’s 55th anniversary featuring a selection of the contemporary art collection, together with generous loans from the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.

This exhibition features 55 paintings from the 1960s to the present that explore a wide range of styles and aesthetic perspectives. The works embrace experimentation and risk, as the artists boldly investigate color, gesture, surface, and composition. From the early modernist influences of the 1930s and 1940s, to subsequent generations of San Francisco Bay Area Abstractionists of the 1950s to the 1970s, painting on canvas shifted to a higher tempo and found new modes of expression. The diverse selection of works attests to the cross-cultural fusion that expanded ideas, methodologies, and practices of what painting could be and achieve.

Contemporary art is the Monterey Museum of Art’s fastest growing domain, in a collection that focuses on California art—past, present, and future. This exhibition sheds new light on well-known and underrepresented California artists whose work pushes boundaries and boldly explores new terrain.