Paul Kos and Isabelle Sorrell, Anglim/Trimble
(L) Paul Kos, Migration 2025 Lino print on cotton rag, wood and elk antlers(R) Isabelle Sorrell, Cenotaph, 2024/25, Acrylic on canvas
November 1 – December 20, 2025
Shifting Sands
By Jan Wurm
Landscapes stretch before our eyes, vistas taken in with a sweeping glance or just an impression held from the past. A frozen form that contains the familiar, the known, the expected. That is, until the day when the landscape has shifted. The wildfire has denuded the hillsides. The storm has flooded the riverbanks and plains. The waves have washed away the beaches. The wilderness, the cultivated, the urban landscape–suddenly the body is disoriented by the altered, the unravelled, the scared.
In the work of Paul Kos, there are declarations: words of caution, signs of danger, warnings of loss.
Paul Kos
Echo
2024
Red Fir, scale model conifers
With Echo (2024), an installation of sculpture, sections of logs with scaled miniature trees stand on pedestals spread to form a visual rendering of the acoustic phenomenon. One centered tree communicates with another spaced to the right, bouncing further back to hit a left positioning, continuing back again further to the right. Like the reverberations of a call for help, the shift is slightly off, beyond the straight or direct and never quite in alignment. Logging, deforestation, drought, environmental degradation –elemental stresses resting in the lone pine. Standing on the ridge, on the edge of a sheer precipice, this tiny survivor sends a warning that is amplified as it echoes through space.
(Detail) Paul Kos Echo 2024 Red Fir, scale model conifers
Paul Kos
Haiku
2025
Stones, wood, paint
The materiality of an artwork, the use of material as metaphor, the use of material for just exactly what it is not –operating on multiple levels; slyly, Paul Kos can cajole layers of association and meaning from stick or stone. Haiku presents us with a lyrical poem of garden. Though small stones may seem to be placed “just right” within a bulge or channel of pattern, this zen garden in this box holds no raked sand. Instead, we have the grain of a wood skin to stand in for shifting sands, the markings and striations of the sediments of a rock demand a truly hard look in search of landscape. Finding serene contemplation in this space may step out of line in favor of musings.
Isabelle Sorrell
Bien-Veillance
2023/24
Acrylic on canvas
Exhibited in the Anglim Trimble Gallery, in conversation with Kos, is the work of Isabelle Sorrell, a life partner in marriage and in art. In the grisaille painting, Bien-Veillance (2023-24), Sorrell renders a snapshot of the proper: pleated skirt, modestly heeled pumps, and pearls. In a public space, with manicured landscaping anchoring the horizon, the figure stands centered, just pausing mid-stride. There is a patience contained in the sunglasses that have been removed for the photograph. There is a heat in the high noon-day sun with its shadows cast across the face and skirt. The dark cascades from chin to bodice, hand to leg to toe, and puddles on the ground. A virtual sundial, the delicately rendered woman nearly dissolves; memory that might just slip away is lost to the hours, the days, the years.
Paul Kos
Dance
2024
Lodgepole pine
Throughout the decades, Paul Kos has rendered the delicate balances in nature both directly and subtly: heart-wrenchingly sad and deeply humorous. It is rare to realize art that instructs without recrimination and bitterness, honors and cherishes without nostalgia and sentimentality. It is a wonder of this profound legacy that the beauty and fragility of nature enter the room and, from gesture and notation, expand to create poetic worlds of fragrance and song. Dance (2024) brings two pieces of wood together, still, they remain anchored just apart, always split, fragments wanting to be whole. It is a dance of tension, longing, desire –yet never fulfilled.
Regarding nature and the environment, thoughts shift to the political and social landscape currently eroding the cultural landscape.
As 2025 ends, the landscape of the art community has been altered so dramatically as to be nearly disorienting. With the conclusion of this tender exhibition, the Anglim Trimble Gallery closes its doors. A gallery with a deep and rich history inherited from Paule Anglim, upheld by Ed Gilbert, and carried forward by Shannon Trimble, it has held the legacy of some of the most significant artists of California.
Gallery owner Jack Fischer, surveys the moment
Adjacent is the recently shuttered Rena Bransten Gallery, another loss of support devoted to a resonant chorus of voices that have spoken through painting, sculpture, and photography. And as the eye moves on, it comes to rest in the Jack Fischer Gallery, a place for the unexpected, the idiosyncratic, the raw, the honest. As of the end of January, Jack Fischer, too, will be closing the gallery.
These are galleries that have weathered storms, moved their lives from Downtown to Dogpatch, carved new paths, banded together, and forged ahead. Dozens and dozens of artists have found space, support, and illumination in these galleries. It can only be hoped that there will be new paths for the exhibition and dissemination of the work –ideas, reflections, and realizations –that will continue to unfold. May 2026 hold stimulating new projects and alliances for all, and a growing strength and resilience in this extraordinary community.
