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Contemporary Symbolism

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Date: 
Saturday, 7 June 2025 to Saturday, 19 July 2025
Opening: 
Saturday, 7 June 2025 - 5:00pm to 9:00pm

Symbolism, that strange and haunted terrain of metaphor and dream, too often standing on the periphery of contemporary art: misread, misplaced, or dismissed as fantasy or whimsy. This dismissal is a kind of forgetfulness, a blindness that loses sight of Symbolism’s deeper tasks to hold what cannot be held, and to attempt to name that which resists being named.

Symbolism is essential and unruly, as the works in this exhibition reveal. Symbolism doesn’t explain; it evokes, drawing us inward beyond surface and spectacle, into something more uncertain and primal and personal. It asks not only what we see, but what we feel, carry, or remember in the marrow of our being.

With this exhibition, a space opens for inquiry. A space where tradition might speak alongside new visions; where cultural myths, personal icons, and unexpected juxtapositions coexist. Featuring an international selection of artists, the exhibition offers a constellation of works moving between sacred and the secular, the timeless and the present moment—each piece a doorway into a deeper symbolic language waiting to be discovered.

The world is starved for meaning. Not spectacle or novelty or noise, but actual meaning: something of substance and depth, something that awakens insight and encourages understanding. Symbolism provides a vessel for this hunger. It doesn’t give us answers, but offers us a place to stand, a mirror to hold, and a question to carry with us.

Curator :

Telephone: 
415.534.1450
Venue ( Address ): 

804 Sutter Street

San Francisco, CA, 94109

Ryan Graff Contemporary , San Francisco

 


 

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