ANNA SIDANA + ADRIAN PALLY: flora and form
June 14 - September 6, 2025
CULT Bureau, Oakland
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 14, 4-6 PM
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present ANNA SIDANA + ADRIAN PALLY: flora and form, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Sidana, and new ceramic spires by Pally. The exhibition opens on June 14 and runs through September 6, 2025, at CULT Bureau (482-D 49th Street) in Oakland’s Temescal Alley. The artist reception is on Saturday, June 14, from 4 to 6 PM.
San Francisco-based artist Anna Sidana makes fecund, immersive paintings that are rich in color and allegory. Depicting a lush bramble of blooms and thorns, Sidana invites the viewer to swim in an emotive wash of color and alluring forms. Adrian Pally is a Los Angeles-based ceramics artist whose signature spire sculptures are playful, intricate, and contemplative works based on forms found in nature, and built for gardens and interiors.
For this new body of work, Anna Sidana continues to depict floral and cotton blooms that evoke memories from her childhood. Depicting a lush bramble of fauna native to India, Sidana invites the viewer to swim in an emotive wash of color and alluring forms. The landscapes Sidana renders are rooted in memory and emotion, and are inspired by her childhood summers on her family’s farm in Rajasthan, where scent, color, and light shaped her earliest experiences. Using cotton as a metaphor, Sidana engages with personal and collective histories. Her work is a sentient response to childhood memories – bridges between past and present, heritage and identity.
Cotton has been woven into the fabric of Indian culture and life since ancient times. Its terroir—the interplay of land, culture, and history—is inextricably woven into Sidana's artistic expression. Conceivably, the first global commodity, cotton has shaped the nation's identity and touched nearly every household. Sidana’s family lived through generations of cotton farming, spinning, weaving, and trading. The cotton flower is a foundational form-factor intertwined in abstract landscapes that are not specific places but rather an immersive and visceral experience. While cotton stands tall and majestic in its beauty, it also hides a tragic and brutal history of colonialism and slavery.
Through color—used liberally but deliberately— and scale, Sidana foregrounds the botanical as larger than life. She depicts an emotional world of sensuous moods in familiar but fantastical, dreamlike labyrinths and landscapes where memory and imagination intertwine. Sidana renders a vivid setting that speaks to the nostalgia for one’s place of birth. In this way, she treats cotton as cultural terroir: a living, symbolic thread that shapes her creative voice. With a background in art, ceramics, film, and horticulture, Adrian Pally blends formal training with an intuitive approach to earthenware. Her work reflects a deep connection to the natural world and is characterized by a distinctive, unbounded style that evokes joy, curiosity, and wonder.
Each of Pally's spire sculptures is a vertical assemblage of hand-built, glazed ceramic forms, carefully stacked to create dynamic compositions, both individually and in groups. Pally begins by sculpting uniquely glazed individual ceramic elements, each subtly evocative of forms found in nature. These pieces are strung together to form a whole, like beads on a thread, to create delicate towers that reach skyward. Pally is inspired by buds, blooms, seed pods, mollusks, sea anemones, corals, and other forms in her garden, and from land and sea. Clay, with its associations with earth and dirt, offers a starting point for exploring all things that germinate and grow. Her influences range from Renaissance still lifes and Victorian botanical illustrations to the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy and the sculptural wire forms of Ruth Asawa. While Pally has been making ceramics for over fifty years, and her spire forms for four years, this is her first two-person gallery exhibition.
Together, Sidana and Pally explore the formal and emotional elements of the natural world, creating works that dwell on associations of form and memory.
