C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present its 48th annual summer show, SUMMER ‘25. This group exhibition brings together artists from the gallery’s longstanding partnerships with those from its newest collaborations, showcasing contemporary sculpture, painting and photography that tell stories of our connection to environment, memory, culture, and everyday life.

The work of Eugene Leake (1911-2005) guides us through rural landscapes and atmospheric painting, while Grace Hartigan’s (1922-2008) washes of color blend together figurative content with the artist’s signature sensibility of vibrant color, active gesture, and painterly freedom. Another local legend, Keith Martin (1911-1983) mesmerizes us with his surreal and entrancing approach to abstraction in painting and collage.

Cuban artist José Manuel Fors creates photographic collages that act as a collection of memories. Images of family and old documents cast in sepia- tone bring together ideas of time and identity. Greek outsider artist Giorgos Rigas (1921-2014) painted from memory the life and activities in the mountain village and seascapes of his childhood - effectively commemorating a life that no longer exists. Additional ideas of place and home are offered in Ben Marcin’s tableaus, featuring structures that act as markers for the larger forces at work in American Culture. Nora Sturges sources from an art history context to create her enchanting small-scale paintings, inspired by the mystery and humanity of late medieval Italian frescoes. Sturges’ intricate brushstrokes build up into surreal environments that, despite their size, expand into worlds viewers cannot help but get lost in.

Summer ‘25 highlights work from emerging artists Heejo Kim and Amelie Wang, who each explore the use of color, the figure and symbolism to weave layers of personal history. Kim’s dreamy figurative paintings feel like fragments of a memory, each lived through curvy, vibrantly molten bodies found in moments of domesticity and candor. Light illuminates, confronts, and sometimes hides portion of narrative -- an expression that reveals much about the artist’s experience as a young woman in Seoul and her desire to find comfort and identity in space. Amelie Wang communicates a tumultuous relationship with China’s deeply censored history; attempting to understand how the social structures in her home country have impacted her daily life as an individual and her family as a unit. These paintings provide the artist with a sense of grounding embedded in their swirling compositions.

In another offering of cultural and political narrative, this exhibition features photography by the ultimate advocate for freedom of expression, John Waters. Across mediums, Waters creates work that examines the space between fine art, entertainment, and the human experience, telling stories with unapologetic depictions of queer identity, racial inequality, and class dysphoria.

The work of Jae Ko and John Ruppert converse on ideas of naturally occurring versus human-created energy and form. Through the manipulation of her chosen medium, paper, the tension built in Ko’s wall sculptures transforms paper in to shapes connected to the force of nature. John Ruppert’s photographs of Italian olive trees utilize digital techniques to composite multiple images, building detail otherwise lost to the limitations of focal length. The final portrait reveals the enduring spirit and sculptural bodies of these ancient trees, and brings focus to the impact of man and the elements over the course of centuries. Work from Japanese artist Hidenori Ishii’s MIRЯOR series explores reflection and invisibility to show the underlying fear of living with the environmental effects of radiation. Ishii has developed a language of painting that responds directly to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown -- incorporating the same resin used to contain the radiation on site, Ishii inserts content directly into his paintings through material. And finally, the light sculptures of Chul Hyun Ahn create visions of the void, which act as optical and bodily illusions of infinity - bridging the gap between conscious and unconscious space through the poetics of emptiness and luminosity.