Palm Springs, CA — ORANGERIE Fine Art presents

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THE CALIFORNIA IMAGE:

Beyond the Commercial Frame

 

Preview Party – Wednesday, May 6, 4 – 8pm

Opening Party – Friday, May 8, 4 – 8pm

The Loft Arts Walk  – Thursday, May 14, 4  – 7pm

 

ORANGERIE Fine Art presents a focused group exhibition (mid-May through August) exploring the uniquely Californian lineage of image-making at the intersection of fine art and commercial culture. The exhibition will bring together the independent works of Greg Gorman, Gary Johns, Huntley Muir, and Rex Ray in a dialogue examining how artists fluent in the language of advertising, branding, and visual persuasion transform that literacy into autonomous artistic expression.

 

California — north and south alike — has long functioned as a laboratory of image production. From Hollywood portraiture, fashion campaigns, and eyewear iconography in Los Angeles, to the Bay Area’s alternative culture, graphic experimentation, and design-forward sensibility, the state has shaped how images circulate, persuade, and endure. Beach culture and counterculture, celebrity mythology and independent publishing, commercial branding and modernist abstraction have coexisted here with unusual fluency. This exhibition also acknowledges an earlier American lineage — represented here through Charles Green Shaw and John Grillo — in which artists first asserted authorship through abstraction, gesture, and structure.

 

The artists proposed for this exhibition emerge from this broader ecosystem. They are not peripheral to California’s image economy — they are fluent within it. This exhibition does not blur art and commerce — it examines the productive tension between them.

 

Why This Exhibition Now

Palm Springs occupies a distinctive cultural position:

• A Modernist enclave deeply attuned to architecture and design

• A collector base fluent in celebrity culture and visual sophistication

• Proximity to Los Angeles, where the mythology of image is continually manufactured

 

The proposed artists reflect that ecosystem. Rather than revisiting prior collaborations, this exhibition foregrounds each artist’s strongest independent voice — work that stands autonomously yet carries the shared DNA of California’s image-making culture.

 

A Next Chapter in the Gallery for Huntley Muir

This exhibition will also mark an important evolution in ORANGERIE’s presentation of Huntley Muir. Following the enthusiastic response to their limited edition works currently on view, Muir will supplement those editions with original paintings, expanding the depth and range of their presence in the gallery. This shift from editioned works to singular, rare paintings represent a meaningful progression for collectors and for the gallery’s program.

 

Original works introduce a heightened level of authorship and material nuance. For collectors already familiar with the prints, this progression offers a compelling reason to return — to encounter the work at a more elevated tier. It signals confidence, momentum, and commitment.

 

The expansion of Muir’s presence strengthens the exhibition’s thesis: these are not artists defined solely by commercial output, but artists capable of moving fluidly between edition, commission, and singular studio practice.

 

The Artists in Dialogue:

 

Greg Gorman - Los Angeles

An iconic portraitist whose dramatic interplay of light and shadow has helped define the visual mythology of Hollywood for decades. Beyond celebrity, Gorman’s practice is grounded in a disciplined investigation of persona, presence, and the psychology of trust. His fluency in campaign imagery lends his independent work a heightened awareness of how images are constructed—and why they endure.

 

The exhibition presents examples of Gorman’s most celebrated portraiture: images produced during a period when the commissioned studio portrait of the actor, musician, or cultural figure functioned as a primary vehicle of public identity. That era—shaped by magazines, publicity campaigns, and controlled image-making environments—has largely receded, displaced by on-set production imagery, digital circulation, and the ubiquity of the self-authored image. Seen now, these works do not read as dated, but as defining: a moment when image-making was both highly constructed and deeply collaborative, and when the photographer’s authorship remained central. Inclusion of recent portraits—ranging from Timothée Chalamet and Dominic Sessa to Jamie Lee Curtis and Liza Minnelli— these works make clear that Gorman’s engagement with cultural relevance remains active, not archival.

 

The exhibition will include a platinum print (platinotype) of Andy Warhol by Greg Gorman (Los Angeles, 1986), a signed and editioned work (2/15) presented in a custom frame. Long recognized as one of Gorman’s most iconic portraits, the image occupies a unique position at the intersection of portraiture and art history, depicting a figure who helped redefine authorship, image circulation, and the relationship between art and commerce.

 

In platinum, the photograph assumes a materially distinct presence—its tonal depth and hand-crafted surface reinforcing the quiet intensity of Gorman’s encounter with Warhol. Within the context of the exhibition, the work serves as a conceptual anchor: not only a portrait of a cultural figure, but a reflection on the very systems of image-making that the exhibition seeks to examine. Few subjects more precisely embody the exhibition’s concerns than Warhol, for whom image-making was both medium and method.

 

The work positions Gorman as a figure moving across eras—carrying forward a language forged in one system of image-making into another still taking shape. ORANGERIE is pleased to present this moment, at once classic and fully contemporary.

 

Gary Johns - Los Angeles

A former Cannes-winning commercial director who pivoted from global brand campaigns to a deeply considered fine art practice, Gary Johns brings a structural intelligence to questions of persuasion, decay, and cultural layering. His work reflects a mind trained in image construction at scale—now turned inward, toward a more personal and investigative visual language.

 

Before turning fully to fine art, Johns operated at the highest levels of commercial image-making, shaping campaigns for major clients including Nike and l.a.Eyeworks. His work placed him in direct creative dialogue with some of the most influential figures in contemporary visual culture: collaborating with photographers such as Greg Gorman and Richard Avedon and working alongside David Hockney in the development of photographic and print-based campaigns. These experiences did not simply precede his studio practice—they continue to inform it, embedding within his work a deep understanding of how images function, persuade, and endure.

 

His longstanding collaboration with Greg Gorman, most recently in HOMAGE, presented at Hohmann Fine Art (Palm Desert) and Galerie Melbye-Konan (Hamburg), and in a related monograph, has been exhibited internationally. In that body of work, in an exceptionally rare light box format example shown at ORANGERIE, Johns reimagined Gorman’s photographic portraits through layered interventions, creating a dialogue between classical image-making and contemporary disruption.

 

At the core of Johns’s studio work selected for ORANGERIE is a collage-based approach—an assembling and reworking of photographic fragments, drawing, and painterly intervention into compositions that feel at once constructed and eroded. There is an offbeat, occasionally irreverent sensibility at play, yet beneath it lies a disciplined inquiry into how images accumulate meaning over time—how they are worn, recontextualized, and seen again. In this respect, Johns enters into a quiet but compelling dialogue with other artists in the exhibition—most notably Rex Ray and Huntley Muir—each of whom engages, in distinct ways, with collage, surface, and the transformation of graphic language into lived form.

 

At ORANGERIE, Johns will be presented independently (the light box alone excepted), allowing his voice to be encountered on its own terms. The exhibition will focus on limited edition works drawn from two loose thematic groupings—Portraits and The Surreal—alongside curated portfolio sets assembled by the artist. While distinct from earlier collaborations, his presence here inevitably resonates with that shared history: viewers may perceive, in hindsight, the same impulse to challenge and reframe the image, now operating without a photographic counterpart.

 

A 2025 print of a crushed Gauloises cigarette wrapper against an ochre ground offers a concise example: an icon of French Left Bank chic and intellectual rebellion reduced to discard, its aura of glamor persisting even as its physical form collapses into detritus. Johns work functions as a bridge within the exhibition: between commercial fluency and conceptual inquiry, between constructed image and altered artifact, between the polished surface of persuasion and the textured afterlife of images once released into the world.

 

Huntley Muir - Los Angeles /the Cotswolds UK

Foundational contributors to the l.a.Eyeworks visual identity, transatlantic artists Huntley Muir (Su Huntley and Donna Muir) bring a rare synthesis of graphic precision, material intelligence, and quiet wit. Their work reflects a deep fluency in the language of design—clarity of line, balance of form, and an intuitive command of color—while subtly subverting the expectations that such fluency might impose.

 

What distinguishes Huntley Muir is not simply their commercial pedigree and cultural achievement (a Grammy nomination, a Cleo, D&AD silver and golds, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto Art Directors Awards, The Munich Biennale Music Theatre Prize, and an Olivier Award for opera set design), but their ability to translate that experience into a studio practice that feels both disciplined and open-ended. Their compositions carry the logic of branding and visual persuasion yet resist closure; they invite sustained looking rather than immediate consumption.

 

Following the strong response to their limited edition works in ORANGERIE’s February debut, this shift from editioned works to singular, rare paintings represents a meaningful expansion of their presence in California. These singular works reveal a heightened material sensitivity and a broader expressive range, offering collectors a deeper encounter with the artists’ hand. This evolution reinforces Huntley Muir’s role as a central through-line within the gallery’s program—an artist not fixed within a category, but continuously unfolding within it. While materially distinct, their practice shares with Gary Johns an underlying logic of assembly—an attentiveness to how fragments, patterns, and visual references are brought into coherence through discipline rather than accident.

 

Rex Ray (1958-2015) - San Francisco

Rooted in Northern California yet fully conversant with the broader West Coast design ethos, Rex Ray occupies a singular position within the California image tradition. Emerging from the Bay Area’s alternative culture while maintaining a refined, almost architectural sense of composition, his work bridges countercultural experimentation and formal sophistication with uncommon ease.

 

Ray’s practice is grounded in collage, pattern, and surface, but its underlying discipline is often overlooked. His compositions—whether on paper, panel, or in more sculptural forms—are built through repetition, variation, and an intuitive sense of balance that recalls both modernist abstraction and the visual language of mid-century design. The result is work that feels at once immediate and enduring: accessible without being simplistic, rigorous without announcing its rigor. In Ray’s hands, collage becomes less an act of accumulation than one of refinement—an ordering of fragments into systems of saturated clarity and abstraction that stand in productive contrast to Gary Johns’s more weathered and provisional constructions of found images and objects.

 

Presented in ORANGERIE’s inaugural February exhibition, Ray’s work quickly established itself as a cornerstone of the gallery’s identity. Its extension within this exhibition is not merely a continuation, but a reaffirmation—positioning Ray as a connective figure across the broader dialogue, linking Northern and Southern California sensibilities, and anchoring the exhibition’s exploration of how graphic intelligence evolves into lasting form.

 

Accent Works

ORANGERIE operates with the conviction that alongside featured contemporary artists, select historical works can serve as anchors—placing present-day practices within a longer arc of American modernism. Accordingly, the exhibition will include singular works by Charles Green Shaw (1892–1974), John Grillo (1917–2014), and contemporary artist Jack Early.

 

Shaw, a central figure in early American abstraction and a leading voice of the Park Avenue Cubists, was among the first artists to articulate a distinctly American modernist language independent of European precedent. He holds the rare distinction of being the only American-born artist to receive two solo exhibitions during his lifetime at Solomon Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting—a testament to his early and sustained importance in shaping non-objective art in the United States.

 

Grillo, working several decades later, was a seminal figure in postwar abstraction, bridging West Coast Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. His practice, grounded in gesture, color, and physical engagement, helped define a distinctly American visual language that was at once improvisational and structurally disciplined. Critic Thomas Albright described him as “perhaps the first and purest action painter on the West Coast.”

 

Jack Early, with whom ORANGERIE opened in February, occupies a distinct position within this lineage. Emerging in the early 1990s as one half of the collaborative duo Pruitt–Early, he quickly entered the highest tiers of the international art world, with exhibitions at Tate Modern (London), the Palazzo Grassi (Venice), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), and a pivotal presentation at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York—one of the most consequential galleries of the twentieth century. His practice, long based in Brooklyn, has recently relocated to his boyhood home in North Carolina, yet continues to be defined by an engagement with appropriation, typography, and the circulation of cultural imagery, extending the concerns of American modernism into the terrain of mass media and Pop-inflected visual language. While not geographically Californian, Early’s practice resonates strongly with the exhibition’s central thesis: the movement of images between culture and commerce, authorship and reproduction. In this context, his presence operates less as an outlier than as a parallel line—one that intersects with the California artists’ shared fluency in graphic systems, cultural reference, and the aesthetics of dissemination.

 

Together, Shaw, Grillo, and Early establish a historical throughline—from the emergence of American abstraction to its expansion into gesture and physicality, and ultimately into the image-saturated, media-aware practices that define contemporary art.

 

California’s artistic distinction lies not in a single aesthetic, but in a fluency with images themselves.

These artists share:

• Mastery of commercial visual systems

• Comfort with celebrity and cultural mythology

• Design intelligence

• The ability to pivot between commission and autonomy

• An unapologetic embrace of aesthetic sophistication

 

Together, their work forms a conversation about authorship in an age of visual saturation. The inclusion of Shaw and Grillo extends this conversation backward, grounding the exhibition in earlier moments when American artists first asserted control over abstraction, gesture, and visual authorship. This is not nostalgia for advertising, but an examination of how contemporary image-makers reclaim authorship from it — and how those impulses echo earlier efforts by American artists to define a visual language of their own.

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ORANGERIE Fine Art seeks to present a compelling narrative of California image culture — artists who mastered the machinery of persuasion and then stepped beyond it.

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The convergence of relationships, audience alignment, and expanded commitments makes this not merely a group exhibition, but a strategic consolidation of a shared creative lineage.

 

~Jim Landé

Gallery Director

 

Opening and Viewing Information
 

Public Opening Receptions:

- Wednesday, May 6, 4-8pm

- Friday, May 8, 4–8pm
Lofts Art District Walk: May 14, 4–7pm
Exhibition run: through end of August
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm, or by appointment

 

ORANGERIE Fine Art
610 South Belardo Road, Unit 500
Palm Springs, CA 92264
www.orangeriefineart.com

 

Press contact:
Jim Landé
310-929-0783