Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Curatorial practice
Website: 1599fdt.com
Facundo Argañaraz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied illustration and painting throughout his youth before earning a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires. He later relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he has lived and worked as an artist and curator for more than a decade.
In 2013, Argañaraz co-founded Et al., an experimental gallery run out of the basement of a Chinatown dry cleaner in San Francisco, alongside Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour; the project became a well-known incubator for emerging and underground artists before closing in 2024. In 2018 he founded his own project space, 1599fdT, first in a Dogpatch studio on Tennessee Street and later in a storefront on Market Street, which he continues to direct as an exhibition venue for other artists. In 2015 he was invited to guest-curate a “Collection Rotation” for SFMOMA’s Open Space, selecting works by Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, and others from the museum’s permanent collection.
As a painter, Argañaraz has shown his own work at galleries and institutions across the Bay Area and beyond, including Ever Gold [Projects], Romer Young Gallery, Berggruen Gallery, Queen’s Nails Projects, Highlight Gallery, and MCCLA in San Francisco; Greene Exhibitions in Los Angeles; The Contemporary Austin in Texas; Sonoma Valley Museum of Art; and ASU Art Museum in Arizona, where his work was included alongside artists from Colección Jumex.
Argañaraz’s paintings often begin as small acrylic-and-UV-ink transfer studies before being scaled up onto canvas or aluminum composite panel, a process that preserves the sheen and imperfection of the transfer even as the image is enlarged. His practice engages with what he has described as “the conditions of contemporary aesthetics locked into an ever-expanding present,” probing the banality and entropy of Modern constructs, the erosion of content and meaning over time, and the problem of originality within a thoroughly commodified image economy.
Recurring in his work are ideas of refusal, sleep, and boredom as quietly counter-political states — a resistance to the productivity demands of contemporary capitalism. Alongside his studio practice, Argañaraz’s parallel career as a curator and gallery founder has made him a consistent presence shaping how younger and overlooked artists are shown in San Francisco.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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