Elmer Bischoff

January 22 - March 19, 2026

Five decades of the artist’s work - 1940s to 1980s.

Nelson Duni was proud to exhibit Elmer Bischoff, a celebration for one of the central figures of the Bay Area Figurative Movement and a pillar of San Francisco art. The exhibition presented some forty paintings and works on paper, spanning the artist’s career from his early abstract, surrealist canvases and his large figurative compositions, to his joyous late abstractions. This comprehensive selection showed Bischoff’s singular ability to capture atmosphere and feeling through brushwork that is at once descriptive and entirely free of representation.

Please see Mark Van Proyen's review of the exhibition in Squarecylinder, here.

Playground, 1954. Oil on canvas, 68 x 55 in, © Bischoff Family Art Trust.

Objects Above and Below the Horizon, 1947. Oil on canvas, 28 x 22 in, © Bischoff Family Art Trust.

Rococo Figures, 1947. Tempera on canvas, 31 1/2 x 39 1/4 in, © Bischoff Family Art Trust.

This was the first Bischoff exhibition in over 20 years to offer five decades of the artist’s work, from the 1940s to the 1980s. In addition to his paintings, the show featured numerous figure drawings from the 1960s and 1970s that were created in studio sessions with other Bay Area artists and are representative of Bischoff’s practice.

A leading voice in the Bay Area Figurative Movement alongside Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Joan Brown, Bischoff (1916 - 1991) bridged abstraction and figuration with a painterly sensibility rooted in atmosphere and mood. His figures often emerge from luminous, ambiguous spaces that evoke narrative. His influence continues to resonate in contemporary painting today. Read full biography.

The exhibition was presented in collaboration with the Bischoff Family Art Trust.