Opening
Saturday, September 12
from 5–8PM

On View
September 12 – October 24 2026

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta presents a dual exhibition of new work by Pasadena-based master ceramist George Sherman and Springs (NY)-based painter Virva Hinnemo. Spanning the gallery’s floors and walls, the artists’ works join together in a constellation that bridges the intimate to the infinite; a neighborhood beneath the firmament from which we view the universe—through a window; through an eye.

Oriented like a compass rose, four directions to the wind, the house forms of Sherman’s Close(d) Neighborhood (2026) face one another as if sharing confidences. From this gathering, whispered words slip out and letter themselves across their outermost elevations: Hawk (inscribed upside down), Wasp, Mole, Deer—creatures that fly, nest, burrow, and roam the earth and that may, occasionally, find their way into our backyards. Entering the nocturnal landscapes of the artist’s hung tray works—ceramic canvases that offer sites for figurative explorations in glaze—we encounter cacti beneath star-filled skies, their flesh and needles illuminated by the pricks of light that travel extraordinary distances to reach us, soft in our gaze upon arrival. Rendered within arched, peaked, and square frames, the subjects of Sherman’s trays are seen through apertures—windows to the world that connect the domestic to the untamed; each its own Urban-Wildland Interface (UWI), the transition zone the artist’s home and studio on Kinneloa Mesa occupies.

In the magic hour Sherman has constructed, the sky is living palette, awash in subtle gradations that seep across the vessel forms of Someday This Will All Be Yours (2026) and Up at Night (2025), positioned on plywood plinths made by the artist—mantles that carry these ephemeral transitions as they would our most treasured keepsakes. Before darkness takes over, Utmost Gravity (2024) and Not a Glaze Test (2024) shoot through the room like meteors entering the atmosphere, burning bright in their rapid descent and captured, mid-streak, before they extinguish.

Hinnemo’s paintings usher in the day, rich in the colors revealed by a new sun. Across twelve stretched linen canvases, the artist conveys abstracted workings-from-life—moments caught from her surroundings that conflate interior and exterior settings and cause us to question where the painter's perspective is located. Often, as in Corner of My Eye (2025), Hinnemo utilizes peripheral vision as a tool to develop full images. By giving her subjects the proverbial side eye, the artist resists the urge to address them head-on, instead allowing for their reveal through indirect scrutiny. The effect of Hinnemo’s weighted, sculptural strokes is the elimination of traditional perspective—a merging of fore-, middle-, and back-grounds into a single plane that puts us within and at-a-distance to her environments. It is unclear, without being confusing, whether we are in the forest of Dance (2026), the tree limbs dipping and swaying around us, or viewing it from a nearby window, open to the breeze.

Each of the artist’s larger-scaled canvases lend a more pictorial vision of her chosen environments, using many brush strokes to build them up and out, whereas the smaller works operate in pared-down abstraction, articulated with fewer, though sometimes bolder, marks. Between paintings, shapes circle and return, reappearing in dialogue with one another as the conversation reforms in every new scene and cues our understanding of concrete objects—can, jar, tree—while enhancing their mutability. They are the things in front of us and the things inside of us—a language outside of the elaborations of words.

In concert, the works of Sherman and Hinnemo establish a world all their own, forming routes that move us along quiet streets and then indicate shortcuts across lawns and over fences, past the doors and driveways of neighbors we know by name or only by sight. Within their respective dimensionalities the artists uncover not opposition, but rather a collaboration that is ever-expanding, infinite beyond comprehension, yet decidedly here—observable; inhabitable. It is a place where we live.

George Sherman is a Pasadena-based master ceramicist. A long-time studio technician and professor (ret. 2018) at California State University (CSU) Long Beach, the University of Southern California (USC), and Scripps College, Sherman is a torch-bearer of and for the California Clay Movement, having been a pupil of Philip Cornelius at Pasadena City College in the late 1960s, and of John Mason at the University of California, Irvine in the early 1970s. George has been part of countless group exhibitions of functional pottery over the last fifty years, but only started showing his own artworks in 2021, when he began initially presenting work alongside his colleague and mentee Stanley Edmondson. In 2022, Marta hosted FOX, BOBCAT, BEAR, the artist’s second-ever solo exhibition. In 2024, at the gallery’s new Silver Lake venue, George presented the monumental works of the presciently-entitled On Fire. Last year, Sherman’s Eaton Canyon home and studio was miraculously spared despite its proximity to what would later come to be established as ground zero of the horrific Altadena fires that came to define Los Angeles in early-2025. Shortly after, George presented Embers (2025), his earnestly tongue-in-cheek exhibition surrounding concepts of chance in life- and art-making. George’s new exhibition, which pairs his work with paintings by Virva Hinnemo, is his fifth presentation with the gallery.

Virva Hinnemo is a Springs, New York-based painter whose work is grounded in perception, memory, and abstracted workings-from-life. Growing up she spent time between Stockholm, Sweden, Viinijärvi, Finland, and Moscow, Russia. She studied at The Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm and, in 1996, received her Certificate of Painting from The Nyckelvisks School of Art in Stockholm. She received her BFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design in 2000. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Kouros Gallery, Halsey McKay Gallery, ILLE Arts, Anita Rogers Gallery, and The Noah Hideout. Her work has been shown in three group contexts with Marta: The North American Pavillion (2023), Rites of Spring (2024), and the gallery’s presentation at Design Miami Los Angeles (2024). She is a recipient of grants from The American Scandinavian Society and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and has made illustrations for a number of books and magazines. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, and The New York Sun.