Past
The Fourth Wall is pleased to present recent work by Bay Area artists, Deborah Kirklin and Robert Poplack, whose beautiful paintings are linked by color, light and, in the end, by content.
"I was painting in Robert's studio for a year during Covid... I focused in on something very immediate, with a lot of color, and a lot of possibility for gesture. We wrote notes to each other. We weren't there at the same time. So you'd go to the studio and there would be this little message and there was a back and forth about the art which was really sweet."
"It was really fun sharing the studio with Deborah because there would be a new still life every day. A lot of the work in this show is from that period and that may have to do with the commonality between our work despite Deborah’s paintings being representational and mine being abstract. I think there has always been a give and take in our work, whether or not we are sharing a space. We share a space in each other’s psyches. "
Deborah Kirklin is a San Francisco Bay Area painter who exhibits her work nationally and focuses on still life and landscape. A member of the still life collective Zeuxis since 1994, Kirklin was also a tenured professor at Santa Rosa Jr. College in Santa Rosa, CA where she taught painting and drawing for many years. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Iowa. Exhibitions include solo shows at Hackett Freedman Gallery in San Francisco, Canada College in San Mateo, CA, Santa Rosa Jr. College in Santa Rosa, CA. She was awarded artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation (2007) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2016, 2022). Kirklin has been a guest lecturer at Stanford University, CCA in Oakland, CA, the University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, San Jose State University, and University of Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont, CA.
Robert Poplack was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan; he had an interest in art from a young age. Between his sophomore and junior year of college he worked with a famed furniture maker in Chiapas, Mexico. Robert later moved to California to study art at UC Santa Cruz. Graduate study was undertaken at UC Berkeley. He is Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame de Namur University where he taught from 1999 until 2019 and was the Director of the school’s Wiegand Gallery. Robert maintains an active studio practice and has exhibited his work in the Bay Area and nationally. He has been included in numerous one and two-person exhibition including at Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco, the OK Harris Gallery in Detroit, Michigan and the Jennifer Perlmutter Gallery in Lafayette, CA. He won a Bureau of Land Management residency--King Range in 2019 where he painted directly from nature while living in a log cabin provided by the BLM. He is married to the painter Deborah Kirklin.