Blunk Space is pleased to present Carolina Jiménez and John Anderson, an exhibition of nine new textile works by Jiménez and eleven paintings by Anderson. Never-before-exhibited and key historic paintings by Anderson, a central figure in Marin’s artistic community, are in conversation with sculptural textile wall works made by Jiménez after her 2024 visit to the Blunk House. Connected by the legacy of JB Blunk, their work explores the translation of a profound life experience—the birth of a child—into a visual language of intuitive mark-making and resonant color.
In 1965, the British surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford offered John Anderson (1932–2011) land on the Bishop Pine Preserve in Inverness, making him the second artist after Blunk to live and work there. A deep friendship and artistic exchange flourished between the Blunk House and Anderson’s home, rooted in a shared dedication to intuitive, direct artmaking, which in turn nurtured interwoven family lives. Four colorful early works reflect his roots in abstract expressionism and the development of his signature combed surface gestures. As he began working as Onslow Ford’s assistant, Anderson developed his own approach to painting, using lines, dots, and circles to access what he called the “primordial landscape” of his inner psyche.
Sime World (1966), painted just after his daughter’s birth, represents this inner landscape during a time of upheaval that was both welcome and terrifying. Four paintings from this pivotal period, with their intense blues and combed marks, map a visual language of nodes and energy as he reconciled the minute elements of new life with the astronomical shift of becoming a father. He described this period as one that woke him up, connecting him “lovingly to life and fearfully to death.” Echoes of this transformation are still present in Untitled (1996), from just a few years before he lost his ability to paint.
Jiménez (b. 1991), a California-born artist now based in Brooklyn, weaves textile paintings and wall sculptures on a floor loom. She hand-dyes her yarns with flowers, bark, and insects, bringing traditional techniques from her family’s home state of Chiapas, Mexico, into contemporary abstract compositions. Her intuitive process with natural dyes resonates with Blunk’s spontaneous collaborations with his natural materials, while the striation of her threads finds a visual kinship with Anderson’s marks.
Her new work bridges the continent and the threshold of motherhood: she began the pieces while heavily pregnant at the Blunk House and completed them in New York after her daughter’s birth. Each captures fleeting, sensory details of this transition— “the Meyer lemons and the first orchid rockrose blooms at the Blunk estate, memories of Drakes Beach and the weight of my belly.” A Changing Landscape (2025), a departure from her usual orthogonal format, echoes the natural curves of Blunk’s sculptures and the fragrant, rolling hills of Inverness. Its threads are suspended between two solid forms, in constant motion.
“I am, at the moment, living in the transformation that Anderson spoke about,” Jiménez reflects. “How do you hold onto a moment that is so large and so fleeting?” This new work doesn’t seek to make sense of that change, but allows her “to trust that in the small and large, it's all there.” This exhibition reveals the shared experience of two artists facing one of the most profound human experiences across form, medium, and generations, forming a meditation on creation in its dual sense: the making of art and the making of a family.