Serge Sorokko Gallery premieres two international exhibitions on Napa’s First Street—and raises the curtain on wine country’s art scene.
By Claudia Castillo Ross · Haute Living, pp. 50–51
There was a time, not so long ago, when a serious art pilgrimage meant a drive over the Golden Gate and a parking garage in Union Square. Not anymore. This fall, the most compelling contemporary art conversation in Northern California is happening on a single street in downtown Napa—and it comes with a double bill.
Serge Sorokko Gallery, the storied dealer’s operation founded in San Francisco in 1984, has fully planted its flag in wine country with two distinct spaces just steps apart on First Street. The flagship at 1301 First Street—a nearly 4,000-square-foot gallery designed by acclaimed architect Craig Steely, with sculptural curved forms that create a sequence of intimate viewing spaces—is joined by the jewel-box exhibition space at 1500 First Street, where Steely’s rotating circular partitions allow the gallery to be reconfigured almost like a stage set. Together, they form something Napa has never quite had before: a genuine contemporary art campus, programmed with the ambition of a museum and the intimacy of a private viewing.
And the fall program does not waste the real estate. The gallery is presenting not one but two U.S. premieres simultaneously—a flex that would turn heads in Chelsea, let alone between tasting rooms.
At 1301 First Street, Richard Phillips: Best Picture debuts the artist’s Nominations series on American soil. Phillips, long fascinated by the machinery of fame, has created a suite of intimate pastel portraits inspired by performances recognized across the major international film awards. The works are quieter than his large-scale paintings, but no less pointed—meditations on cinema, celebrity, and how cultural icons are constructed, frame by frame, season by season. Standing among them, you feel less like you’re at an exhibition and more like you’re backstage at the awards themselves, watching the myth-making up close.
A short stroll down the block at 1500 First Street, the mood shifts entirely. Vasily Klyukin: Eclipse gathers more than 20 new and recent works—sculpture, illuminated light boxes, and the artist’s signature three-dimensional paintings—into an immersive exploration of light, technology, movement, and perception. Klyukin, whose monumental sculptures have appeared everywhere from the Venice Biennale to the State Russian Museum, builds his complex forms from laser-cut sheets of industrial material joined without a single fastener. The results seem to hover between engineering and enchantment. Where Phillips asks you to look closely, Klyukin makes it impossible to look away.
The pairing is no accident. Sorokko has spent four decades placing museum-caliber work—his roster includes Hunt Slonem, Donald Sultan, Jordy Kerwick, Adébayo Bolaji, Isabelle de Borchgrave, Leonard Baskin, and Nathan Oliveira, among others—and championing artists across international borders long before it was fashionable. What he’s building in Napa is a natural extension of that vision: significant international contemporary art in direct conversation with the region’s celebrated culture of design, wine, and hospitality.
It’s a conversation this valley is ready to have. We’ve long known that great wine and great art share a vocabulary—structure, balance, provenance, the patience to let something reveal itself. Now, between a morning tasting and a long lunch, visitors can stand before a U.S. premiere, then cross the street and stand before another. That’s not a gallery stop on a wine itinerary. That’s a destination in its own right.
Awards season may belong to Hollywood, but this fall, the best picture—and the best sculpture, for that matter—is showing in downtown Napa.
