Jenny Sharaf

Jenny Sharaf (b. 1985, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, installations, murals, ceramics, videos, and participatory projects explore abstraction through the visual and cultural mythology of California. Working with saturated color, fluid gestures, psychedelic surfaces, found imagery, and large-scale architectural interventions, Sharaf draws together the histories of abstraction, counterculture, feminism, fashion, Hollywood, and West Coast visual culture.

Raised in Los Angeles and based in San Francisco, Sharaf has described California itself as an important subject within her practice. Her family's history in the film and television industry gave her an early familiarity with the manufactured imagery of Hollywood and the mythology surrounding the "California girl." Sunshine, landscape, glamour, femininity, celebrity, leisure, and self-invention appear throughout her work not simply as subjects but as components of a larger visual language shaped by the state's continual production of its own image.

Sharaf's paintings are immediately recognizable for their expansive fields of color. Acrylic paint pools, pours, swirls, stains, and moves across canvas in compositions that can evoke Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, psychedelic graphics, tie-dye, fashion, and the atmospheric effects of the California landscape. Her process embraces fluidity and chance while remaining attentive to the formal relationships among color, surface, gesture, and scale.

This approach extends naturally beyond the conventional canvas. Sharaf has frequently painted directly onto walls and architectural surfaces, producing immersive installations in which color transforms the viewer's experience of a room. Her murals and site-specific projects allow painting to become environmental, collapsing the distinction between artwork, architecture, decoration, and atmosphere.

Found photographs and printed imagery provide another important component of her practice. Sharaf has worked over vintage magazine pages and landscape photographs, allowing passages of vivid abstraction to obscure, interrupt, or frame images inherited from popular culture. Photographs from the 1960s and 1970s are particularly resonant, carrying with them idealized representations of women, beauty, domesticity, landscape, and California life. By partially covering these images rather than eliminating them, Sharaf creates a tension between nostalgia and critique, seduction and resistance.

Her work moves continually between analog and digital processes. Images may originate as physical paintings, photographs, or found materials and pass through digital manipulation before returning to physical form. Sharaf treats these translations as interconnected rather than opposing ways of making, reflecting the fluid movement between physical and screen-based imagery that characterizes contemporary visual culture.

Fashion has similarly provided both a visual source and a conceptual framework. Seasonal palettes, rapidly shifting trends, commercial styling, and the production of desire offer parallels to the cycles through which contemporary art and culture are consumed. Sharaf uses the language of fashion without maintaining a strict boundary between "high" and "low" visual culture, allowing decorative pleasure and critical reflection to occupy the same space.

Alongside her studio practice, Sharaf has been deeply engaged with collaborative and artist-driven cultural activity. She founded the Parking Lot Art Fair in San Francisco, developed the 24-Hour Telethon at The Lab, and has organized public art projects and cultural activations for the City of San Francisco. These projects extend her interest in art beyond the production of discrete objects toward temporary communities, gatherings, and alternative spaces for encountering art.

Sharaf has exhibited and produced projects internationally, with presentations in the United States, Japan, France, Switzerland, Lebanon, Australia, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates. Her work has appeared at venues including Bolinas Museum, California; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Berkeley Art Center; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; The Lab, San Francisco; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; New Image Art, Los Angeles; and FOG Design+Art, San Francisco. International projects have included exhibitions and installations in Tokyo, Paris, Geneva, Beirut, Toronto, Dubai, and Brisbane.

In 2023, Bolinas Museum presented Sharaf's solo exhibition It's All Flowers. That same year she created a large-scale entrance installation for FOG Design+Art in San Francisco and presented Sakura Ceramics in Tokyo, reflecting the increasingly multidisciplinary character of a practice that has expanded from painting and installation into ceramics and other object-based work.

At Haw Contemporary, Sharaf presented the solo exhibition Flow State in 2019, followed by Side Hug in 2021. She was also included in DECADE, the gallery's tenth-anniversary exhibition, in 2023.

Sharaf has completed numerous commissioned and site-specific projects, including works for Google, Vans, Capital One, Bonobos, FOG Design+Art, and the Ace Hotel & Swim Club. She has participated in artist residencies and special projects at Google and Headlands Center for the Arts, and her work is represented in corporate and private collections including Google, Capital One, Bang & Olufsen, and collections of prominent figures in art, technology, fashion, and entertainment.

Sharaf received her BFA from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2009 and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland in 2013. She lives and works in San Francisco, where her practice continues to move between painting, installation, ceramics, curatorial activity, and collaborative projects.