Closing Saturday Feb 1st, 2-6 pm, with poetry and performances, open Saturdays and Sundays 2-6 pm and by appt. This Thin Utopia, a week long exhibition of selections from Ernest Rosenthal's archive of drawing, painting, and printmaking on the occasion of his 100th Birthday, a milestone that will occur on January 23rd and be celebrated at the exhibition opening on Saturday, January 25th. The exhibition draws from a 50 year period, starting in the 1940's and with a focus on the shifting relationship between figuration and abstraction in Ernest's work. A solo exhibition is scheduled in May. Interdisciplinary artist Karim Shuquem will be showing prints and paintings in conversation with Ernest Rosenthal. Ernest Rosenthal was born in 1920, into a Jewish family in Vienna. As a teenager Ernest hitchhiked to Paris with a friend and saw Picasso's Guernica at the 1937 World's Fair. After Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria, Ernest was expelled from high school and the family was expelled from their country. After a couple of attempts to cross the border, which included a brief imprisonment on the Austrian side, Ernest and his father were able to rejoin their family in Belgium. They spent a year as stateless refugees, awaiting US Visas under the immigration quota system. Ernest was informally admitted to art classes, at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels where he mainly worked in portrait sculpture. The Rosenthal family was allowed to enter the United States in December of 1939. All of Ernest's relatives that remained in Europe were killed in the Holocaust. Ernest was drafted into the US Army from 1943 through 1946. He made small watercolors throughout his deployment in Iceland, France and Germany. After his discharge, Rosenthal and his wife, modern dancer Meryl Streitman, moved from New York to California. The couple settled in Laurel Canyon, near Ernest's friend and mentor, Swiss American artist Hans Burkhardt. Over a span of seven years Meryl and Ernest built their own home . After its completion, Ernest and Meryl headed to Mexico City where Ernest studied painting, lithography, and intaglio printing on the GI Bill and Meryl studied dance. In the early 1960's Ernest was recruited by June Wayne, the founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop to be trained as one of the technicians who would revive the art and craft of the vanishing practice of stone lithography. Ernest's lithographic prints for artists such as Ani Albers and Nathan Oliveira are held in various museum collections. From the mid 1960's through the mid 1980's Ernest taught printmaking at Occidental, CSUN, and at Cal State Dominguez Hills where he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1984. Ernest experimented with process and technique in printmaking throughout this fecund period, alongside his drawings and paintings. A few prints from this experimental, and somewhat unstable later body of work, that Ernest has titled The Vanishing Prints will be on view. Ernest has exhibited in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. After retirement, Ernest's creative practice shifted to his garden, poetry, and peace activism. Ernest Rosenthal published his first book, Not For Drones in 2011 at the age of 91. https://www.facebook.com/ernest.rosenthal.7 Building upon a 27 year history as a stage performer and rock singer, Karim Shuquem creates installations, sculptures, and prints that have relationship with staging, temporality, and process. In the early 2000’s, Shuquem was lauded as the expressive front man of Bay Area punk band The Phantom Limbs while simultaneously getting a degree in graphic design and a BFA from CSU East Bay. After his undergraduate studies Shuquem was the artistic director at Chicago non-profit The Arts of Life and manager of art gallery Reversible Eye. Shuquem has recently completed the Otis College MFA program and works as an art teacher. http://shuquem.com Image: Ernest Rosenthal, Untitled Serigraph, 26x40 in 1970's