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."

From the Mount, Oil and watercolor on canvas, 66 x 42 inches
Golden Weaver, Oil on canvas, 45 x 60.5 inches
Occupying a complex place in the Southern imagination—nostalgia, hatred, utility—the maligned kudzu vine has become a symbol for many Southerners who feel disenfranchised. Originally imported for decorative gardening, its rapid and unmitigated spread has made it an onerous invasive in the popular imaginary. Kudzu, though, is extremely functional; every single part of the plant is edible. In their work Catanese reclaims this “undesirable” plant as a symbol for the magic tenacity of nature.
The Sea Raven's Byway (Diptych, 2024), Oil and watercolor on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

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.”

INQUIRE

nimah gobir

“Several moments in time are referenced in each painting and as always, my family is prominently featured. In these works you’ll see a lot of photos of my mom, dad and sister as well as aunties and uncles. There are several more family members in the photo transfers in the works.”

[I] collapse time and lineage...to create an interconnected series of work where one art piece might reference another.

Uncle (2024), Oil paint, photo transfer, fabric, and embroidery thread on canvas, 38 x 40 inches
No Food 4 Lazy Man (2024), Oil paint, photo transfer, fabric, and embroidery thread on canvas, 64 x 50 inches
Gobir pieces together her compositions like a collage, referencing several family members, memories, and personal locations simultaneously. She hopes “to create an interconnected series of work where one art piece might reference another —either with a couch that you see in different works or a photo that’s transferred into one piece but serves as a reference to another piece.”
Look Success (2024), Oil paint and photo transfer on canvas, 50 x 62 inches

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.

INQUIRE