Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7, 6–8 pm

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present So Far, So Good, featuring new work by Charlie Edmiston in his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Spanning nearly two decades of artistic exploration, the exhibition revisits different periods and approaches within Edmiston’s practice, bringing earlier ideas and forms into new contexts.

Throughout his career, Edmiston has developed a distinct language of abstraction, continually reworking, refining, and expanding a core set of visual ideas. Forms that first appeared years ago return in altered ways, taking on new meaning through changes in scale, composition, and context. The process of revisiting and reinterpreting earlier work became a central focus of this exhibition.

Edmiston’s background in graphic design informs his approach to painting, particularly his use of hierarchy, balance, repetition, and proportion. These principles guide the relationships between color and form throughout the work. As a colorblind artist, he approaches color intuitively, relying on contrast and visual relationships rather than traditional color theory. Limited palettes and recurring colors create a sense of rhythm and cohesion across individual pieces and the exhibition as a whole.

So Far, So Good brings together six rectangular paintings alongside Edmiston’s signature shaped works. The exhibition also revisits the artist’s stripe series, which he first began exploring in 2008 and returned to in 2015, when his work remained entirely flat. Created using the same materials and processes as his dimensional pieces, these paintings establish a connection between distinct stages of his practice, highlighting the continuity of ideas across changing forms.

A site-specific installation further explores this relationship between past and present. The work incorporates forms Edmiston saved from projects completed over several years, originally created as separate concepts rather than as parts of a larger composition. Reconfigured for the exhibition, these elements come together as a unified installation, bringing together varied materials, shapes, and ideas into a new arrangement.

The physical character of Edmiston’s work has also evolved. In the new paintings, depth is largely reduced, placing greater emphasis on their graphic qualities and the interplay of shape and color. After years of working primarily with spray and roller paint applications, Edmiston returns to the brush, embracing a more direct, hand-painted surface. The contrast between the precision of machine fabrication and the visible marks of the artist’s hand introduces a renewed sense of materiality and immediacy.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Edmiston works within the Southern California tradition of hard-edge abstraction. By bringing together graphic design, contemporary production methods, and the physical language of painting, he continues to refine a distinctive approach to abstraction. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea; Copenhagen, Denmark; Knokke, Belgium; Ludwigsburg, Germany; and New York, among others.