For the first show of the twentieth anniversary, Meridian Gallery will open a newly assembled exhibition of work by Sandy Walker, drawn on his extensive repertoire in the landscape genre. The exhibition will feature large-scale paintings and drawings, as well as woodcuts - a medium Walker has explored and given attention to for over several years.

The visual information in all these, whether painting, drawing or woodcut, tangles with abstraction and representation in the seemingly casual placement of strokes and marks. This contentious stroke-making, with brush or other, brings tension and excitement to the work. Even though much of the show is black on white, color, even exuberant color, is of great importance to Sandy Walker. Stehekin Symphony in 2 Parts, his most recent very large diptych, could not be more bold in choice of red and yellow.

Sandy Walker maintains a studio in West Oakland and teaches, as visiting faculty, at the Studio School in San Francisco. Perhaps the practice that is most central and influential in Walker's work is his decision to periodically travel to his mountain cabin in the North Cascades and place himself, like many of the grand landscape painters, in the embrace of the mountain, the embrace of the sky, and the forever changing light of the forest.