Rio Kobayashi & Fritz Rauh

January 18 - March 1, 2025

Rio Kobayashi & Fritz Rauh features new furniture by Japanese-Austrian designer Rio Kobayashi and historic paintings and works on paper by German-born Fritz Rauh (1920–2011). Several never-before-seen paintings by Rauh, an emblematic painter of Marin’s mid-century artistic community, play against contemporary furniture made by London-based Kobayashi at the Blunk House in 2024. Connecting them through the hinge of JB Blunk’s legacy, a conversation emerges around organic forms, free intuitive expression, and vigorous color deftly bound by technical rigor. 

Like JB Blunk, the German-born Rauh (1920–2011) settled in Marin County in the 1950s, part of a dynamic art scene that was connected to San Francisco through people and ideas, but maintained its own independent spirit. Rauh’s successful solo exhibition at San Francisco’s De Young Museum in 1956 established him as a distinct voice in abstract expressionist painting in Northern California. Rauh and Blunk became close friends after their introduction through a mutual friend, the British surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, on whose land Blunk built the Blunk House in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  

Rauh’s densely patterned, almost hallucinogenic paintings masterfully mix skillful craft with an instinctive search for beauty and dimension. The saturated bright colors are inherently joyful, and the organic shapes reference forms from lucid dreams and nature. But the paintings initially belie Rauh’s intentional restrictions: the evenly spaced shapes form a subtle evenness, nearly as rational as his contemporaries’ obsession with the grid. 

Kobayashi (b. 1989), who has both Austrian and Japanese ancestry, approaches his aesthetic influences and materials with reverent humor, allowing the slim elegance of Vienna Secession furniture to dovetail with sleekly organic traditional Japanese forms. He crafts functional objects that are never too far from sculptures; his respect for functionality requires him to respond to human needs and his material’s limits, while his technical skill allows him to play with form. During his stay at the Blunk House in 2024, Kobayashi sourced salvaged redwood from local sawyer Evan Shively at Arborica. The resulting furniture echoes the shapes of the wood’s original unfinished forms, with freewheeling aesthetic associations from modernist painting to wabi-sabi.