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Simchowitz Gallery

@simchowitzgallery

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On view:
Julio Rizhi | 10/11/26 -> 2/26/27 | 1850 N Hill Ave
Dané Estes | 9/17 -> 10/16 | 2785 E Foothill Blvd
By appt: [email protected]

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Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda/Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going

October 11, 2026 – February 26, 2027

The title Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda—Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going—looks backward and forward at once. It considers the people, places, and histories that form us alongside the futures we imagine for ourselves. Migration, both as lived experience and inherited memory, provides the exhibition’s central thread.

Rizhi’s mother is from Malawi, with ties to Chewa culture and the traditions of Gule Wamkulu; his late father was Nyungwe and came from Mozambique. They migrated to Zimbabwe, where Rizhi was born. His father’s accounts of that journey became an early family archive - one that later prompted the artist to study histories of migration across Southern Africa.

In Rizhi’s work, this personal history opens onto a broader account of movement as both necessity and aspiration. People cross borders in search of work, shelter, security, and opportunity, but the journey is never only a passage from one place to another. It also carries forms of knowledge: memories, customs, stories, and ways of making that adapt without disappearing.

That process of adaptation is embedded in Rizhi’s material language. Drawing on the structures and rhythms of pottery and weaving, he moves from research and sketching to forms built from mesh and wire. Plastic is then layered, heated, colored, and worked by hand. A material associated with consumption and waste becomes pliable, tactile, and unexpectedly alive.

Color is equally purposeful. Rizhi returns to vivid tones because, as he says, “the future is bright.” Yet the optimism is not weightless: it is carried by a material with a previous life and by structures that remain visibly under tension. Hope emerges here as something made and remade; a practical act rather than a decorative theme.

(Cont. in the comments...) by @simchowitzgallery

Julio Rizhi
@julio.rizhi
'Kwatiri Kubva Nekwatiri Kuenda - Where We Are Coming From and Where We Are Going'
10/11/26 > 02/26/27 by @simchowitzgallery

Kwatiri kubva nekwatiri kuenda, Where we are coming from and where we are going by @simchowitzgallery

Dané Estes
'Alack, There Lies More Peril in Thine Eye Than Twenty of Their Swords'
On view until 10/16

Alack, There Lies More Peril in Thine Eye Than Twenty of Their Swords brings together a new body of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Dané. Across the exhibition, surfaces are built up and stripped back, images are obscured and reappear, and materials carry traces of what they have been through.

In the paintings, layers accumulate, are covered over, scraped away, or absorbed into the surface. Earlier decisions remain present, sometimes visibly and sometimes only as residue. The finished painting becomes a record of its own making, holding what has been added, lost, and changed along the way. Works on paper draw from fragments of earlier paintings alongside images of the retina, connecting the physical act of seeing with memory and the history of the work itself. The sculptures bring a similar sense of change into three dimensions, with forms that appear to be growing, emerging, or caught between states.

The exhibition takes its title from Romeo and Juliet. During the balcony scene, Romeo says of Juliet, “Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye / Than twenty of their swords.” Her gaze poses a greater threat to him than the physical danger surrounding him, bringing attraction, vulnerability, and risk together in the image of the eye.

For Dané, the line speaks to how much of ourselves we bring to the act of seeing. We rarely encounter something without bringing our own memories, expectations, associations, and wants to it. What we notice, overlook, or recognize is shaped as much by what we carry with us as by what is actually in front of us.

This idea becomes literal in the works on paper, where images of the retina sit within surfaces made from fragments of earlier works. The eye is both an image and a way of thinking about the work: seeing is not passive or fixed, but something that changes through experience.

Transformation is therefore less a subject of the exhibition than a process running through it. Things are added, erased, recovered, and altered. What remains is not simply the final image or object, but the evidence of what came before. by @simchowitzgallery

Dané Estes
@dvneestes
'Alack, There Lies More Peril in Thine Eye Than Twenty of Their Swords'
09/17 > 10/16
OPENING SEPTEMBER 17TH, 5 PM - 8 PM
2785 E Foothill Blvd, Ste 100, Pasadena, CA 91107 by @simchowitzgallery

Ken Taylor Reynaga
Carrots, 2025
Oil on canvas
33.5 x 32.5 inches by @simchowitzgallery

Ken Taylor Reynaga
'Beneath the Avocado Tree'
On view through 07/25
Come visit!

There is a particular kind of shade, soft and irregular, shifting with the wind, where time slows just enough to notice what usually slips by. Beneath the Avocado Tree begins in that space.
In this exhibition, Taylor Reynaga approaches the landscape not as distant scenery but as something inhabited, labored in, and carried physically. Fields, mountains, and domestic interiors unfold in saturated color and restless
line, shaped less by direct observation than by recollection, by the sensation of being inside a place that has already taken hold of you. The paintings resist stillness. They move between figuration and abstraction, between presence and erasure, as if the image itself were struggling to retain what cannot be fixed.
At the core of these works are those whose labor sustains daily life, figures largely unacknowledged. Forms appear and recede, elongated, fragmented, or partially absorbed into their surroundings. Cowboys, workers, and
caretakers move through the terrain, their bodies bending toward it, merging with it, until the boundary between figure and ground dissolves. A hat becomes a hill. A body becomes a shadow. The land holds their imprint, even when it does not name them.
“I think of the people,” the artist reflects. “The people who take care of our landscape. My people. The ones who clean our homes, fix our cars, grow and harvest our food, build our houses, repair our plumbing, hang our lights, and cook our meals. Beneath this tree, I think about how they remain unseen. How we’ve lived invisible within the land we cultivate, to the point that we’ve become part of it.

(Cont. in comments...) by @simchowitzgallery

Ken Taylor Reynaga
@_ken10000
'Beneath the Avocado Tree'
05/03 > 07/25
OPENING MAY 3RD, 11 AM - 3 PM
1850 N Hill Ave, Pasadena, CA 91104 by @simchowitzgallery

Intimacy is not closeness. It’s distance held together.

Stefan Simchowitz @stefansimchowitz presents Two of Us - Andrey Samarin @andreysamarin1 and Lera Derkach @lederkach working side by side without becoming the same.

Two practices. Two rhythms. One shared field.

The tension is the point.

Simchowitz Gallery @simchowitzgallery 📍 Hill House, Pasadena
Save this. Read it. Visit.

Review By Catapult - @munchiesartclub by @simchowitzgallery

Lily Ramírez
'So Far Out of Sight'
2/15 > 4/11 by @simchowitzgallery

Lera Derkach & Andrey Samarin
'Two of Us'
02/15 > 04/11 by @simchowitzgallery

Lily Ramírez
@lilydizzyfoshizy
'So Far Out of Sight'
02/15 > 04/11
OPENING FEBRUARY 15TH, 11 AM - 3 PM
1850 N Hill Ave, Pasadena, CA 91104 by @simchowitzgallery