- When
- Sat, January 10 2026
- Where
-
b. sakata garo fine art
923 20th Street - Time
- 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Description
Gail Chadell Nanao was born in New York City in 1941 and earned her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1962, where she studied with such influential figures as Nathan Oliveira, James Weeks and Frank Lobdell. Over the decades, she has developed a distinctive figurative-expressionist painting practice rooted in the Bay Area figurative lineage—an approach characterized by strong brushwork, impasto texture and emotive engagement with the human form.
Her subject matter is often the nude figure and self-portraiture, rendered in bold scale and dynamic surface, as she imbues each work with personal narrative, memory and psychological depth. In addition to large-canvas oil paintings, Nanao engages with works on paper—including monoprints—and has at times worked in ceramics and drawing.
Nanao’s life and work have been shaped by trans-cultural experience: in the 1960s she and her late husband—the Japanese-born painter/printmaker Kenjilo Nanao—lived and traveled between New York, Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay area, participating in residencies in Rome and Oslo. Among her awards and residencies is a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Tamarind Studio (1968) and a stay at the historic studio of Edvard Munch in Norway, which served as a seminal turning point in her renewed painting practice in the 1990s.
Her exhibition history spans both coasts and overseas: a solo retrospective, “Her View: The Bay Area Figuration of Gail Chadell Nanao”, was held at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (2018) in Sonoma, CA. Her work is represented in institutional collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (e.g., Albuquerque Venus 1, monoprint) and has been featured by galleries such as the Kim Eagles‑Smith Gallery (Mill Valley, CA).
With a practice that spans nearly six decades, Gail Chadell Nanao remains deeply engaged in exploring identity, memory and the body through the painterly medium.
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