Nick Ryan Gallery is pleased to present Resolution, a two-person exhibition featuring new work by San Francisco–based painter Daniel Chen and Boulder-based artist duo Berger & Föhr.
Working in distinct visual languages, Chen and Berger & Föhr investigate the ways images emerge, transform, and are ultimately resolved through perception. Chen's paintings filter memory and lived experience through fragmented planes of color and form that shift between recognition and abstraction. Berger & Föhr's machine-assisted drawings translate systems, patterns, and material processes into intricate visual structures. Bringing these practices into dialogue, Resolutionconsiders how meaning is constructed from fragments, how images are shaped through both intention and process, and how viewers participate in completing what they see.
Daniel Chen is a San Francisco–based painter who spent his formative years between the Bay Area and Taiwan. He studied at the Academy of Art University and California College of the Arts and comes from a family of artists, including a maternal grandfather who was a traditional calligraphy painter and art teacher and a mother who is an oil painter based in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
“I make paintings of memories. Memories are often fragmented and fuzzy; we tend to remember them as a whole while the edges blur and details fray. Though individual fragments may be incomplete, the larger picture emerges when viewed together.”
— Daniel Chen
Berger & Föhr is the collaborative practice of Todd Berger (b. 1975, Chicago, IL) and Lucian Föhr (b. 1988, Boulder, CO). Working together since 2002, the duo creates geometric abstractions through machine-assisted drawing and other process-based media. Their work is grounded in systems, repetition, and the interplay between human decision-making and predetermined structures.
Berger & Föhr see in grids. After twenty-three years of shared authorship, they work through units, intervals, and proportion. The grid is not applied after the fact. It is the structure through which compositions are found, varied, tested, and brought into physical form.
The same logic runs through their design practice. Like their identity systems and graphic work, drawings are built on a grid specific to the intention, shaped through alignment, density, and repetition. But where design serves an external brief, the gradient drawings answer only to themselves.
Once a composition is resolved, it is rarely treated as singular. Berger & Föhr iterate serially, adjusting scale, grid unit, and density to see where an idea can go. Variations may be paired as diptychs or gathered into collections, where small differences become legible against one another. A series is the same idea examined from many positions, each revealing what the last could not. Seriality is inquiry made visible — a direction followed until interest is spent.
Drawings are made in pencil, through a machine-assisted process refined over the better part of a decade. Each pass is prepared by hand, then run, and repeated for every unit of a composition. Visible gradients are made from lines too fine and too closely spaced to resolve by eye. They overlap and build, pass over pass, until individual marks become a continuous field. As the pencil wears, less graphite or pigment reaches the paper and each stroke widens — the surface drifts even as the system holds. Within that control, the studio leaves room for chance — small deviations of machine and material, accepted and welcomed rather than corrected.
None of it is automatic. The machine draws but decides nothing, moving only as each pass is configured for it. The marks are mechanical. The judgment behind them is not. Berger & Föhr’s drawings are not handmade in the traditional sense, and they are not machine-made in the industrial sense. They occupy the space between.
What the gradients hold is time — not a single moment but its passage. Graphite or pigment is laid and abraded, the pencil slowly wearing as the lines accumulate. This layered decay makes time visible as most surfaces never do — as duration, accumulated rather than depicted. Here those marks are the surface. They are the work. The gradients are not an image of change, but change itself, held on paper.
