James Ochman (1953-2019) was a San Francisco artist with a philosophical bent and an almost machine-like ability to create strict geometries and stark waxy surfaces on his abstract paintings. His promising career was cut short in the early 1980s when he was diagnosed with HIV. His beguiling ab stractions languished in his studio for over 40 years until they reappeared after his his death in 2019.

James Ochman (1953-209) explored formal issues in abstraction in a deeply spiritual way. His monochromes and geometric paintings of the 1970s play the spirituality of the non-objective world against the materiality of the canvas and paints in a concise and elegant ways. His paintings pulsate with the deep state knowledge of abstraction's historical attack on realism and its own material constitution. These unresolved dichotomies between the visual extravaganza of the void and the banality of the material object always give the viewer a chance for reflection.