MARY FERNANDO CONRAD: Impermanence
November 1–December 12, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, Nov 1 | 1- 3 PM
CULT Aimee Friberg | 1401 16th Street, San Francisco
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
— excerpt from Mary Oliver’s When I am Among the Trees
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Impermanence, a solo exhibition of new paintings on canvas, linen, and paper by San Francisco–based artist Mary Fernando Conrad. This marks Fernando Conrad’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show runs from November 1 through December 12, 2025, with an artist reception on Saturday, November 1, from 1–3 PM.
Mary Fernando Conrad’s work is situated at the intersection of the built environment and the natural world—this exhibition explores the latter—and at the threshold of abstraction and representation. In Impermanence, she explores the fleeting and fragile nature of perception, memory, and daily life through intimate, domestic landscapes and abstractions. Working from her studio, a converted stable in West Marin, California, Fernando Conrad has been painting two separate vantage points as a record of both place and time, engaging with these as abstracted concepts. "What is permanence in this moment when everything seems about to change?" she asks.
Questioning change is ever at the forefront as she watches the landscape outside her studio—land she has personally cultivated and lovingly restored to native species. She tends this land, once stewarded by the Coastal Miwok people and now threatened annually by California’s increasingly severe wildfire seasons. Through this practice of tending and painting, her observations become transmutations: an offering, an act of devotion to the place she calls home.
Mary Fernando Conrad is an artist, thinker, mother, gardener, architect, and cultivator of the land. While not defined by any single role, each element of her persona is encapsulated and distilled in the vast range of her work. As such, Fernando Conrad has been creating work that explores the intersections of memory, domestic life, climate change, and perceptual experience for decades, more recently giving herself permission to make art as the other demands of her life have receded. From installation to sculpture to paintings and works on paper, Conrad synthesizes influences from American modernists and post-modernists. While cultivating a deeply personal approach to line and shape in her paintings, she also gives much intention and thought to the emotive qualities of color.
Fernando Conrad’s practice engages with the visual languages of Charles Burchfield and Philip Guston, drawing on simple shapes, arcs, and geometric forms, as well as playful caricature and deliberate palette choices. She integrates these influences into her own distinctive visual language, navigating the peaks and valleys of artistic experimentation to create compositions that feel both personal and universally resonant. "To make my view, my perspective permanent: such was my intention," says Conrad.
Through painting, Conrad invites viewers to dwell in the delicate tension between stability and change, exploring how ordinary spaces and daily rituals carry significance, memory, and emotion. Her work meditates on time, observation, and the act of bearing witness to life’s quiet rhythms.
CULT and Fernando Conrad will release a new publication MARY FERNANDO CONRAD: PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER 2023–2025, during the run of her exhibition.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mary Fernando Conrad lives and works in San Francisco and West Marin County, California. She works in painting, installation, and sculpture. In previous years, her creative output investigated social infrastructure through the use of vernacular materials such as neon signage, plastic, and packaging. Solo and group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area include Arion Press, Ictus Gallery, Michael Rosenthal Gallery, Luggage Store, CULT Bureau, Gospel Flat, Great Highway, and others. In 2021, she installed a sculpture as part of the Tenderloin National Forest/Luggage Store Annex, where she had completed a residency a decade prior.
Publications include: (*) making a book: by Marfeco (Mary Fernando Conrad) (2022) and MARY FERNANDO CONRAD: PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER 2023–2025, which will premiere at her solo exhibition, Impermanence at CULT Aimee Friberg in November 2025.
Fernando Conrad has served on the board of Southern Exposure and supported numerous Bay Area institutions since the early aughts. She received her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in English Literature from Cornell University and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University after attending the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Born in the United States, Conrad lived abroad for many years in France and Indonesia, as well as during her childhood in Sri Lanka.
