Andre Catanese +
Nimah Gobir
Johansson Projects presents Andrew Catanese and Nimah Gobir at FOG Art+Design 2025. Both bay area-based painters, Catanese and Gobir reflect on the visual and cultural environments that shape their lives.
Catanese’s lush paintings recall the kudzu-laden landscapes of their upbringing in Virginia. Interested in how contemporary ideas of gender, race, and sexuality are deeply rooted in the death of the commons and privatization of land, Catanese’s paintings transform discarded landscapes into green spaces where plants and animals flourish. Catanese’s swirling compositions articulate their complex relationship to the American South and bring nuance to constructions of the self.
Gobir’s work is similarly rooted in the environment of the domestic interior. Often drawing from family photographs and other personal ephemera, she combines painting with embroidery, patterned textiles, and photo transfer to create patchwork portraits of intimate memories and family histories. The child of Nigerian-born parents, Gobir’s work interrogates enduring results of diaspora and the renewal of belonging to a home.


Andrew catanese
“The paintings pull from studies made in 2023 and 2024. The work began while visiting Georgia in 2023, while at an art opening at a friend’s gallery in South Atlanta. Next to the art center there was a towering mountain of garbage in a landfill. But you would never know, because every inch was covered in kudzu and other fast-growing plants that live in the South.”
"I've been interested in the idea of discarded places...where wild animals and plants flourish."



Catanese’s most recent body of work focuses on social interactions between land and people. Their paintings feature disregarded elements of landscapes such as drainage ditches, landfills, abandoned farms, buried oil pipelines, and other infrastructure, which become places of refuge and proxies for marginalized people and identities.
According to Catanese, “the paintings focus on the transportive feeling these places have and their ability to remind us we are a part of the natural world.”
[I] collapse time and lineage...to create an interconnected series of work where one art piece might reference another.



Gobir’s most recent body of work resurrects the past collapses time through the use of composite images from her family archives. Similar to her artful blending of disparate mediums—photo transfer, oil paint, and embroidery—Gobir weaves together time and space by referencing these photographs and ultimately renders a kaleidoscopic view into the domestic life of 90’s and early 2000’s Nigeria.
Johansson Projects presents Andrew Catanese and Nimah Gobir at FOG Art+Design 2025. Both bay area-based painters, Catanese and Gobir reflect on the visual and cultural environments that shape their lives. Catanese’s lush paintings recall the kudzu-laden landscapes of their upbringing in Virginia. Populated with horses, hunting dogs, and the occasional wisp of a foxtail, their work rejects the dualism that often characterizes the distinction between animal and human, nature and culture. Finding inspiration and parallels to growing up queer in traditions like the foxhunt, Catanese’s swirling compositions articulate their complex relationship to the American South and bring nuance to constructions of the self. Gobir’s work is similarly rooted in the environment of the domestic interior. Often drawing from family photographs and other personal ephemera, she combines painting with embroidery, patterned textiles, and photo transfer to create patchwork portraits of intimate memories and family histories. The child of Nigerian-born parents, Gobir’s work interrogates enduring results of diaspora and the renewal of belonging to a home.
Andrew Catanese (b. 1993 Ann Arbor, MI) is a painter and sculptor from the American South. They earned a BFA in Studio Art at the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA a Stanford University. Catanese has shown their work in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA), Maune Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Macon Arts Alliance (Macon, GA), Banana Factory Arts Center (Bethlehem, PA), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), and Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art (Augusta, GA). Artist residencies include The Creatives Project, Artist in Studio Residency in Atlanta, GA, Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville Virgina, among several public art projects for murals and public sculpture. In 2021, they were awarded the prestigious Cadogan Scholarship that supports master of fine arts students. Catanese currently lives and works in Palo Alto, CA.
Nimah Gobir (b. 1993 in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and educator based in Oakland, California. She earned her B.F.A. in Studio Art and B.A. in Peace Studies from Chapman University before pursuing an M.Ed. at Harvard Graduate School of Education, specializing in Arts in Education. Through paintings and installations, her work explores the nuanced tapestry of Black identity. Drawing inspiration from familial and personal archives, she creates figurative works that capture the ways loved ones are reflected in one another and illustrate how their everyday habits shape their living spaces. Her artistic process extends beyond conventional mediums to embrace expressive brushwork, hand-stitched embroidery, and a fusion of household textiles. Her creative endeavors have been highlighted in Hyperallergic, 48Hills, and SF/Arts. In 2020, she completed a fellowship with Emerging Artist Professionals SF-Bay Area. Gobir has shown work at Root Division, Johansson Projects, SOMArts, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, where she was selected to be part of their Emerging Artist Program. Additionally, Gobir was recently selected to be part of Recology’s 2024 artist in residence cohort. With upcoming projects poised to further amplify her artistic voice, she continues to weave together threads of memory, identity, and resilience in her work. She is in the permanent collection at The Crocker Museum.