Jenny Sharaf is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. Her paintings, installations, murals, videos, and happenings celebrate process, while reflecting on art history, counterculture, feminism and abstraction. She explores the mythology of California, Hollywood vernacular and the quintessential “California girl” in the work, partly because of her family’s legacy in the film and television industry and growing up in Los Angeles.  Sharaf earned her MFA from Mills College.

Her saturated color palettes feel referential to art history and pop culture, yet are uniquely her own. Often they stand alone as vivid psychedelic acrylic paint passages swirling across large canvases or are applied directly to walls to create large immersive fields of color. Other times they fall over magazine images from the 1960 and 70s to explore the history behind California’s sorted female mystique -- or applied to grand landscape images provoke a sense of nostalgia for a time we never knew was so deeply grounded in this altered terrain; deepening and bringing light to what being a California artist means. Jenny's process is very intuitive and goes back and forth between digital and analog, connecting in formal and conceptual ways. Sharaf's work aims to make art and art environments that are simultaneously nuanced, accessible and transcendent.

In recent work, Sharaf explores the intersection of fashion and art as they relate to the fast-paced seasons, international calendars and global trends. Choosing on-trend tweeds, tartans and ginghams as the surface backdrop to loud splashes of color, there is a tension between homogenization and expression, femininity and materiality. Sharaf’s work is in the permanent collections of Ace Hotel, Google, Rachel Zoe Inc, Yoko Ono, Capital One and more. She is currently working on some exciting fashion brand collaborations and preparing for large scale painting installations in Beirut, Lebanon.

Location: Haw Contemporary Crossroads