SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Berggruen Gallery presents Far Side of Town, an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Gregory. This marks his sixteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 7 through June 25, 2026, with a reception for the artist on June 25 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM.
Taking its title from Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” a song recounting the hardship of a South Dakota farmer, Gregory’s paintings engage the metaphors of the American West alongside the hopes, dreams, and labor bound to the land. His signature barns and silos emerge within rolling plains and expansive skies. Horizon lines undulate, hills rise and recede, and veils of fog and diffuse light surface through a restrained yet luminous palette. The scenes are at once intimate and familiar, yet temporally indeterminate, producing a quiet dislocation of place and history.
Gregory’s engagement with the American West resists deconstruction of its mythos, instead treating landscape as a register of time. Rendered with meticulous detail and measured symmetry, the paintings stage encounters with openness—roads and plains that convey both majesty and unease, the ethereal and the eerie held in tension. Rural structures, recurrent in his work, trace cycles of decay and renewal: their surfaces, though seemingly pristine, bear subtle inscriptions of weathering, positioning them as artifacts of both lived and imagined pasts. In these luminous, atmospheric fields, temporal distinctions collapse, suggesting that the land cannot be seen apart from the residues of its histories. Gregory’s work thus meditates on duration as it is inscribed across artifice and terrain, recalling T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Old stone to new buildings, old timber to new fires, old fires to ashes, ashes to the earth.”
Born in 1955 in Los Angeles, Gregory has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum; Becton, Dickinson and Company; the Delaware Art Museum; the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science; the Honolulu Advertiser Collection; the San José Museum of Art; and the USEU Mission and Residence. Formerly based in Bolinas, California, he now lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.
