Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Website: ginamcontreras.com
Gina M. Contreras was born in 1985 in Fresno, California, and grew up in the Central Valley. She received an AA from Fresno City College in 2006 and a BFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, where she was awarded the Schmidt Community Arts Fellowship, the Bronze Roller Honor, and won Best in Show in the Anne Bremer Memorial Library Artist Book Contest. She has lived and worked in San Francisco since completing her degree, currently residing in the Russian Hill/Polk Gulch neighborhood.
Contreras has received significant recognition for her practice, including the John S. Knudsen Prize from the Crocker Art Museum in 2022 — a $25,000 award accompanied by the museum’s acquisition of her painting Protection for Past Memories and Future Fantasies — and a Svane Foundation Grant in 2020. Her work has been covered in Juxtapoz Magazine, KQED Arts, SFGate, and included in New American Paintings (Pacific Coast edition, 2023). Her work is held in the public collections of the Crocker Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Anne Bremer Memorial Library at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Since 2010, when her first solo show opened at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, Contreras has mounted exhibitions across the Bay Area and beyond, with solo presentations at Park Life Gallery, Mule Gallery, Hashimoto Contemporary, and Chefas Projects in Portland, Oregon. She has also been represented by LaiSun Keane gallery in Boston. Her work has been shown internationally, including in a group exhibition at Hoxton Arches Gallery in London in 2021.
Contreras works primarily in acrylic, gouache, and graphite on canvas, making paintings that are dense with color, pattern, and personal symbolism. Her training as a printmaker is legible in her approach to composition: she employs flattened backgrounds, solid color blocks, and bold outlines, creating works in which the foreground figure — almost always a nude self-portrait — presses forward against an environment of layered patterned fabrics. These textiles are drawn directly from her life: her mother’s kitchen curtains, a San Marcos tiger blanket she received as a teenager, rosary beads, serapes, and religious icons such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. She works in her studio apartment, often in early mornings or late nights, moving around the space in ways that shift her vantage point and introduce multiple perspectival registers into single paintings.
The recurring subject of her work is the self — depicted vulnerably, often nude and in bed — navigating grief, longing, romantic secrecy, and body acceptance. Her practice addresses the intersection of her Chicana upbringing and contemporary lowbrow aesthetics, and she cites photographers Laura Aguilar, Louis Carlos Bernal, Larry Sultan, and Nan Goldin as influences alongside Mexican Surrealist painter Remedios Varo. The result is an intimate figurative practice in which cultural memory, emotional candor, and a darkly humorous sensibility coexist in the same composition.
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