One of the pioneers of Futurism, Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) is best known for his dynamic paintings depicting movement and speed to convey the energy and pace of the modern era. In their search for a defining painterly style, the Futurists experimented with the techniques of Divisionism before adopting the overlapping facets of Cubism as a means to express dynamism and movement in their paintings. Inspired both by Cubism’s fracturing of an object into various planes and by E. J. Marey’s chronophotography that captured a rapid succession of shots on a single photographic plate, Balla began superimposing almost frame-by-frame images of an object in motion. By 1913, when Balla began signing his pictures "Futur Balla," his work became more abstract and he began depicting speed and velocity in planes of color that pushed the limits of representation. The Futurists strove to depict motion in their paintings as a tribute to the dynamic forward thrust of modernity—as such, racing cars, speeding trains and airplanes became favorite subjects of Balla and his contemporaries.

Throughout his career, the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló (born 1957)  has explored a variety of styles, from neo-expressionist canvases to colorful still lifes and pale, thickly textured abstract paintings. An artistic nomad, Barceló draws inspiration from his time spent in varying locations; though he always returns to his native Mallorca, over the years Barceló has also worked in Barcelona, Portugal, Palermo, Paris, Geneva, New York, the Himalayas, and West Africa. Working across a wide range of mediums, including paintings, works on paper, ceramic, and bronze, Barceló has continued to experiment with the materials of his art, sourcing his own pigments from across the world for his paintings. Across this diverse body of work, there are several recurring themes. He has continued to be fascinated by the natural world, creating richly textured canvases that recall the earthly materiality of Catalan painters such as Antoni Tapies and Joan Miró, as well as compositions that study the effects of light and the ever-changing colors of the sea. He has also explored the history and traditions of painting, exploring the medium’s traditional subjects and technical challenges through his experimentation with the treatment of light, color, perspective, and composition. 

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) has a dual role in art historical memory, as both painter and patron. An independently wealthy member of the Impressionist circle, he became the group’s financier—sponsoring shows, purchasing works, providing studio space for his fellow painters—in addition to painting and exhibiting alongside his Impressionist peers. 

By 1888, Caillebotte had left Paris for his country house some twenty miles down the Seine from Paris in Petit-Gennevilliers, where he increasingly focused on his interests in horticulture and sailing. Caillebotte was an avid yachtsman, rower, and boat designer; he raced in regattas as a younger man, and when he was older began building his own boats. Living just across the river from Argenteuil—where he had painted alongside Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir in the 1870s—from his residence Caillebotte enjoyed a view of the water and sailing scenes became one of his preferred subjects at this time. 

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) had at first a halting engagement with the practice of art, working for nearly two decades in his family’s wine business before devoting himself exclusively to art in 1942, while living in occupied Paris during the war. In 1945, Jean Dubuffet began collecting art made by those at the margins of history— people from so-called “primitive” societies, children, those confined to psychological institutions, and more generically outsider art—which he termed “Art Brut” [“raw” or “rough” art].  He believed Western civilization and culture to be stifling in its decorum and conformity, and looked to the raw and uninhibited expression of Art Brut as a fresh alternative and inspiration for his painting. 

Inspired by the art of children and other, non-western sources, Dubuffet’s early landscapes often feature a high horizon line and flattened perspectival space, employing a childlike vantage point in defiance of western art history’s tradition of naturalistic space.  His works from the early ‘40s feature vibrant colors, but by 1945, he had abandoned his colorful palette for earthier tones and gritty, textural surfaces. 

Upon moving to New York in 1978 to enroll at the School of Visual Arts, Keith Haring (1958-1990) found a thriving alternative art community developing outside the gallery and museum system in the city's downtown streets, subways, and night clubs. He became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance, and graffiti artists that comprised the burgeoning downtown art community. In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with a wide public by drawing with white chalk on the unused advertising panels in the subway stations. Over the next five years, as he showed in galleries and museums, he made thousands of these drawings—honing his distinctive lanugage of symbols and characters and achieving widespread recognition while maintaining his commitment to public accessibility. In his subway drawings, Haring developed the language and themes that would define the rest of his career, creating accesible, symbolic imagery which expresses universal concepts such as birth, death, love, sex, and war. Using a primacy of line and directness of message, Haring's art became a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century. He used his art to engage with contemporary concerns ranging from prejudice and the suppression of human rights to the prevalence of consumerism, capitalism, and the growing use of technology.  

Though he had rejected the innovations of Cubism in pursuit of his experiments with color, in 1913 Henri Matisse (1869-1954) began subtly experimenting with the style. Living in Paris during the Great War—though he was eager to enlist, he was rejected due to a heart condition—his work took on an austere and somber tone, and were often dominated by a black and gray palette and a geometrical severity. While this shift may be most evident in his paintings, it is also reflected in his drawings.

As the curator and art historian John Elderfield explains, Mattise's still life drawings underwent an evolution in these years, inspired in part by his study of Cubism: "The newly monumental version of organic form that Matisse discovered in this period (and which climaxed in the great still-life paintings of 1916) owes its particular density to the increased gravity of his line, but also to a change in the manner of his visual address to objects.... As with Cubist drawing, the intervals between the parts are as conclusively present as the parts themselves, for it is in those intervals that the rigorously defined space forces itself on our imagination. Of course, Matisse had always paid attention to the pictoriality of the white ground. But now it is tensely charged in quite a new way, as positive and negative areas interchange in expressive importance" (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, London, 1984, p. 68.)

In early July of 1933, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) arrived in Cannes with his wife Olga and their son Paulo for their annual seaside summer vacation. Though he and Olga had been married since 1918, the artist had felt restless in his marriage for years and had been engaged in a passionate, secret affair with the much younger Marie-Thérèse Walter since 1927. This affair had inspired a revelatory new chapter in his work, with his muse’s voluptuous features and statuesque, classical profile inspiring sensuous, colorful nudes and a remarkable new interest in sculpture. 

Unable to join Picasso in the South of France that summer, as Picasso had discreetly arranged in recent years, Marie-Thérèse remained ensconced in Paris while the painter vacationed with his family. Despite their distance, Marie-Thérèse’s distinctive figure and seductive imagery permeates Picasso’s work from this period of separation. Her sensuous figure appears sunbathing at the beach, in imaginary, surrealist confrontations with Olga, or in the form of a sculpted bust or classical nude model in the sculptor’s studio. Making no paintings over the summer, Picasso focused exclusively on a remarkable and revealing sequence of works on paper at this time, executing some thirty gouache, watercolor and ink works, all on sheets measuring around 15 ½ x 20 inches. Widely varied in style and mood, these Cannes drawings are at turns classicizing or radically surreal, ranging from a restrained sense of eroticism to a dramatic tone of violence. 

Since the early 1960s, Wayne Thiebaud (born 1920) has been celebrated for his paintings of quintessentially American, everyday objects in bright colors with lusciously crafted impasto—such as cakes and pies, hot dogs and hamburgers, gumballs and lollipops, and jackpot machines. Over his remarkably long career, he has painted still lifes, landscapes, and portraits that are familiar and accessible, but also synthesize and reflect a wide range of influneces: the everyday subjects of Pop art, the painterly surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, the American tradition, the masters of art history, and the commercial language of advertising and illustration.

Experimenting with color, texture, light, and composition, he has repeatedly tackled the same subjects to challenge and explore the formal possibilities of painting. He continues to live and work in Sacramento today.

For nearly 100 years, Acquavella Galleries has sold major paintings and sculpture to private collectors and museums worldwide. After first dealing in Old Master paintings, since the 1960s Acquavella Galleries has been distinguished for its expertise in the fields of 19th, 20th and 21st century art. Today, the gallery regularly exhibits and deals in works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lucian Freud. On the primary market, the gallery represents Miquel Barceló, Jacob El Hanani, Damian Loeb, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Through its exhibitions, Acquavella has also gained a reputation for organizing shows of particular note, both loan exhibitions and for-sale shows. Among the most significant over the past several decades include Lucian Freud: Monumental (2019), Californiia Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn / Wayne Thiebaud (2018), Calder / Miró Constellations (2017, in collaboration with The Pace Gallery), Jean Dubuffet "Anticultural Positions" (2016), Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing (2014), The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art (2013), Lucian Freud Drawings (2012), Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective (2012), Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism (2011), Robert and Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection (2010), and Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse (2008).