Santa Fe | Michael Bergt + John Tarahteeff + Shinji Himeno

Bringing together three distinctive approaches to figurative painting, the exhibition considers the human form as a bearer of myth, psychological experience, and imagined identity. Across these works, recognizable bodies inhabit spaces governed by their own internal logic. Historical references, symbolic structures, altered proportions, and improbable encounters move the figure beyond straightforward representation and into a more uncertain realm of meaning.

Michael Bergt’s recent paintings position the body within geometric systems drawn from mathematical, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. Figures bend, extend, and interlock with circles, spirals, triangles, and fields of primary color, allowing physical movement to become part of a larger visual order. References to the Fibonacci sequence, sacred geometry, the yin-yang symbol, and wave-particle duality provide structures through which Bergt examines consciousness, transformation, and the process by which perception gives form to experience. Executed primarily in egg tempera and informed by his longstanding dialogue with art history, these works preserve the exacting presence of the classical figure while situating it within an expanded symbolic field.

John Tarahteeff constructs psychologically charged worlds from remembered images, recurring motifs, and ideas that emerge during the development of each painting. His figures appear absorbed in private actions whose purpose remains just beyond explanation: a young woman guides a boat through a darkened landscape; another sits beside a miniature car and an excavator; elsewhere, a reclining figure becomes entangled with a garden, an oversized tree, and the suggestion of departure. Shifts in scale, unusual lighting, and carefully staged surroundings unsettle the apparent familiarity of each scene. Tarahteeff does not seek to describe the visible world so much as to reconstitute it, allowing narrative to remain suspended between recollection, intuition, and invention.

Shinji Himeno draws upon the formal precision and concentrated observation of Renaissance painting while placing his figures within enigmatic contemporary narratives. In Woman in Blue, an elegantly rendered profile is surrounded by a dense gathering of marine creatures, bringing idealized beauty into proximity with the strange diversity of the natural world. Woman in the Glass presents the body contained within a transparent animal form, an image Himeno associates with human transience, fragility, and beauty. In Kronos, the circular composition functions as both a painting and an instrument of time: a female figure pursues Chronos around a rotating watch dial, transforming the measurement of time into an allegory of its inescapable passage.

     In Semblance, the figure becomes a point of passage between the tangible and the imagined. Bergt, Tarahteeff, and Himeno retain the descriptive authority of representational painting while directing it toward realities that cannot be fully explained. Their works give visible form to states of transformation, inviting meaning to emerge through the unstable relationship between what is seen and what may lie beneath its appearance.

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Semblance
Michael Bergt + John Tarahteeff + Shinji Himeno
September 25 – October 17, 2026

Opening Reception
Friday, September 25, 2026 | 5:00–7:00 PM