Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Public Art
Website: caseygray.com
Casey Gray was born in 1983 in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in the San Jose/Los Gatos area. He earned a BA in Painting and Printmaking from San Diego State University in 2006, then returned to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, completing the degree in 2010. Gray has lived and worked in San Francisco since 2008, residing in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood and maintaining a studio in the Bayview district.
Over more than fifteen years of active exhibition, Gray has built a body of work rooted in the still life tradition while pushing it into distinctly contemporary territory. He has shown extensively in San Francisco and nationally, with solo presentations at Park Life Gallery, White Walls Gallery, and Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, as well as at Circuit 12 Contemporary in Dallas, Ampersand Gallery in Portland, and the Direktorenhaus Museum for Art, Craft & Design in Berlin. His work entered the permanent collections of the de Young Museum and Stanford University, and he has held residencies at the Internet Archive (2020–21), Google in Redwood City (2021), Facebook HQ in Menlo Park (2017), and the Chalk Hill Artist Residency in Healdsburg (2019).
In 2020 Gray became a father during the pandemic, an experience that shifted the thematic focus of his practice toward animals and the playful imagery of childhood, culminating in the 2022 exhibition Wild Animal at Hashimoto Contemporary. His 2024 solo show Sweet Bountiful Life, his fourth at Hashimoto Contemporary San Francisco, continued his exploration of communal abundance through elaborately staged food and tabletop compositions.
Gray works almost exclusively with acrylic spray paint — specifically Montana Gold aerosol — combined with painstaking hand-cut masking techniques using frisket film and an X-acto knife. Every element in a painting is masked and sprayed individually, layer by layer, with each object typically built from four or more passes of color. Nothing is stenciled or reused; every mask is a one-off. The result is a distinctive hard-edged realism that sits somewhere between the precision of graphic design and the richness of traditional oil painting, a quality Gray himself calls “skewed realism.”
His paintings draw on the compositional DNA of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still life — vanitas arrangements, curiosity cabinets, trompe l’oeil ledges — while filling those structures with thoroughly contemporary objects: tinned fish, skateboards, houseplants, children’s toys, breakfast foods, and outdoor gear. The color palette is bold and saturated, the compositions densely packed yet carefully balanced, projecting what Gray describes as “calmly maximalist” energy. Recurring themes include leisure, communal gathering, suburban nostalgia, and what he calls “the meaning embedded in everyday life.” Alongside his paintings, Gray carves wooden sculptures using a scroll saw, sanding and finishing the forms with molding paste and paint to produce relief objects that extend his visual vocabulary into three dimensions.
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