Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Painting, Screen Printing
Website: runcio.com
Jonathan Runcio was born in Montreal, Canada, and lives and works in San Francisco, California. He earned both his BFA and MFA from California College of the Arts, where he received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant upon graduation in 2011. His practice sits at the intersection of sculpture, painting, and the graphic traditions of public art, drawing from the visual language embedded in streets and structures that compose the everyday built environment.
Runcio gained recognition in the Bay Area art scene through solo and group exhibitions at prominent San Francisco galleries, including Ratio 3 and Romer Young Gallery. In January 2015, he co-founded CAPITAL with artist Bob Linder, an artist-run project space first located in San Francisco’s Chinatown at 716 Sacramento Street. The intimate 12-by-12-foot storefront gallery, notable for its full front window, presented tightly curated exhibitions before expanding to a larger Mission District space above Ratio 3 in 2017. Beyond his San Francisco presence, Runcio has exhibited nationally at venues including ASU Art Museum in Arizona, The Contemporary Austin in Texas, Greene Exhibitions in Los Angeles, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.
In 2023, Colpa Press published Facade, an artist book with text by critic Sarah Hotchkiss that examines the transformation between Runcio’s source imagery and his finished paintings. The book tracks how public surfaces — sidewalk mosaics, gate patterns, garage-door inlays — become abstracted through his studio process.
Runcio’s work centers on the eroding geometries of the built environment: incidental patterns embedded in sidewalks, graphic inlays on garage doors, and the angular confluences of gates and walkway railings. He employs stencils, spray paint, and screen printing — forms historically associated with public address and street communication — applying them to sculptural objects executed in steel, concrete, brass, enamel, and mirror. This deliberate use of vernacular mark-making tools ties his studio practice to the public spaces that supply its imagery.
His work evolved from early screen-printed and spray-painted patterns on bent plexiglass — architectural graphics that echoed the structural forms they decorated — toward increasingly material sculpture grounded in industrial matter. The introduction of mirror in later works implicates the viewer directly in the spatial composition, making the gallery space itself part of the subject. Whether in painting or three dimensions, Runcio’s practice reconciles idealized modernist futures with the decaying present of contemporary urban surfaces, finding in everyday geometry a residue of utopian promise.
Glass in the Garden (2013) — Solo exhibition of sculptural objects drawn from built-environment geometries, executed in steel, concrete, and paint, at Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.
Facade (2023) — Artist book published by Colpa Press with text by Sarah Hotchkiss, tracing the transformation from Runcio’s urban source images to finished paintings.
Joan Mitchell Foundation — Jonathan Runcio (2011) — MFA Grant recipient upon graduating from California College of the Arts.
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