Bruce Hasson: Sculpture and work on paper
Kevan Jenson: Paintings, drawings and photograms
Catalogues accompany both exhibitions.

Meridian Gallery opens its three floors to two exhibitions curated by renowned art historian Peter Selz. Huge paintings in smoke and pigment on canvas by LA artist Kevan Jenson will fill the spacious ground floor gallery with his smoke drawings and the 2nd floor Drawing Gallery with his photograms. In the Performance Gallery on the 3rd floor, Bruce Hasson, a Bay Area sculptor with years of study in Italy, will display a new cast bronze bell containing melted guns. In addition, bell sculptures and works from his Standing Interiors series will be featured accompanied by sensitive working drawings and other works on paper.

Bruce Hasson draws inspiration from his studies around the world, and is especially influenced by the Etruscan art in Tuscany and Southern Italy, the Egyptian and Assyrian art collections of the British Museum, the Inca art of Peru and the Mayan art of the Yucatan. "A sense of continuity, a connection to ancient and Renaissance art as well as to the modernist tradition appears in the art of Bruce Hasson," comments Peter Selz.
Hasson was born in 1954 in Los Angeles. He lives and works in the Bay Area, though he often travels to Italy and Latin America where many of his works have been created. He was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Academia di Belli Arti in Florence, where he received traditional training in figurative art and to the academy in Carrara where he studied sculpture, which was to become his vocation. In both Tuscan cities, the exchange of ideas, of different approaches to art and divergent sensibilities with students from Egypt and Yemen and beyond was stimulating.

In 1975 he had his first solo show in Florence. For the next five years Hasson spent much of his time in Italy, working on commissions and his own work. The marble carvings were done in Italy and the bronzes were cast in Berkeley, where the expert craftsman Piero Mussi founded the Artworks foundry. There Bruce Hasson engaged with other sculptors, Stephen de Staebler, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Nathan Oliveira, Jack Zajac and Peter Voulkos, who bought some of Hasson's work fresh from the foundry. During the '70s and '80s Hasson continued his commissions and made sculptures and assemblages consisting of things he had collected in Europe and America and all kind of found objects which he would weld together with an acute sense of geometry and composition. He was inspired by Etruscan implements and by the vitality of their bronze and terra-cotta human effigies.

Hasson's work in the Meridian show consists of newly cast sculpture in the bell series which he began in 1993 as well as works from his figurative Standing Interiors series. The interiors provide a space that allows Hasson to create and arrange his objects arbitrarily. This activity validates his personal search for "metaphysical meaning in a world plagued by chaos and broken identities."

Together with work on paper-drawings and recent prints-the Hasson show offers an in depth showcase for the work of this internationally renowned artist at his mid career.