Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Conceptual art, painting, drawing, curatorial, text
Website: ajit-chauhan.com
Ajit Chauhan lives in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. He works with adults with developmental disabilities at Creativity Explored, reads a lot, plays with cats, and practices tai chi. He is part of Right Window Gallery, a collective of poets and painters. He holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited internationally and his approach to curating — as seen in the Monument exhibition at Minnesota Street Project — treats collaborative, cross-ability artmaking as a central creative and ethical proposition.
Chauhan’s art practice and his work at Creativity Explored are not easily separated. He brings the same conceptual seriousness to both: an investment in the radical potential of overlooked voices and forms, in collaboration as a practice rather than a strategy, and in art that opens onto larger philosophical and social questions without announcing its intentions too loudly. As a curator he has drawn on sources as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and the work of CE studio artists to build exhibitions that hold conceptual and emotional complexity in balance. His own visual work — which includes painting, drawing, and text-based work — has been shown internationally while maintaining a quiet, considered presence in Bay Area contexts.
- Forethought (2019) — Erased record cover, 16⅜ × 16⅜ in.; in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, acquired 2022 through the Accessions Committee Fund purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams
- Jacob’s Ladder (2020) — Erased record cover, 16⅜ × 16 in.; in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, acquired 2022 as a gift of the artist and Anglim/Trimble
- ReRecord (2009) — Installation composed of 162 erased record album covers pinned together on a wall, forming unresolved and slightly faded portraits; the work highlights the ephemeral nature of image and identity through accumulation and erasure; shown at the Saatchi Gallery, London
- From the Pencil Area (2011) — Fifth solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery; erased LPs in which engineered patterns, meticulously mapped, mimic intricate vibrations that cross, repeat, collide, and fade; the title taken from Robert Walser’s “pencil method” — prose and poems written in letters measuring a millimeter in height; the show also included stamp drawings and completed puzzles
- knock knock knock (2015) — Spray enamel, typewriter ink, and pencil on paper, 8¼ × 11¾ in.; made during his Headlands Center for the Arts residency; part of a body of work investigating text as image and mark-making, drawing on Arte Povera’s investment in the unexpected poetry of modest, unassuming materials
- 2022 — Three works acquired by SFMOMA permanent collection, including Forethought and Jacob’s Ladder
- 2021 — Monument (curatorial), Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco
- 2018 — Way Bay 2, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive — included alongside Jay DeFeo, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Larry Sultan, Sadie Barnette, and Frank Moore in BAMPFA’s sweeping two-century survey of Bay Area creative practice
- 2015–2016 — California Visual Affiliate residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito
- 2011 — From the Pencil Area (solo), Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco
- 2009 — ReRecord, Saatchi Gallery, London
- CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco); Asian Art Museum (San Francisco); UC Davis Museum; Grimm Museum (Berlin); SONS Museum (Kruishoutem, Belgium); White Columns (New York); Jack Hanley Gallery; Annarumma Gallery (Naples); SVIT Praha; Et al. / Et al. etc. (San Francisco); Anglim/Trimble; KMAC Museum (Louisville, Kentucky)
- Part of Right Window Gallery collective, San Francisco
- Permanent collection: SFMOMA
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