About the Artist
When I lived in Japan, I became attuned to beauty in unexpected juxtapositions: a Shinto shrine beside a pachinko parlor, a rice paddy pressed against a highway. I remember noticing a small Buddhist temple tucked between two large, modern buildings. The sacred and the ordinary coexisted naturally, without hierarchy.
Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, I began to see my surroundings through that same lens. Here too, contrasts live side by side: development meeting wetlands, infrastructure cutting through open land. There is a wildness in this region.
Some paintings reference these landscapes directly, where the built and natural intersect. Others explore that tension through scale, gesture, and color. Thick oil, chromatic depth, and layered surfaces echo the density and vitality of the land.
My new works are an ode to unlikely coexistence: the quiet beauty that emerges where the ordinary and the primordial meet. I am very excited to preview these with Hang Gallery at the San Francisco Art Fair, April 16-19.
BIO
Bailliere holds an MFA in visual art from Mills College, a BA cum laude in French from Duke University with extensive coursework in visual art and art history, and a post-bac in visual art and design from UC Berkeley. While on a Duke junior year abroad in Paris, she studied art history at the Université de Paris and painting at the Académie de Port-Royal. Bailliere spent a high school semester at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Lacoste, France where she focused solely on drawing and painting. As an elementary school student, she attended Saturday high school figure drawing classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art in her hometown of Baltimore.
In addition to sustaining an active studio practice, Bailliere is an adjunct professor of art at both Contra Costa College and at Los Medanos College where she teaches drawing and painting.
Bailliere's work has been presented at Hang Gallery, the San Francisco Art Fair, Art Miami, the Mills College Art Museum, the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Art Center, among other venues. Bailliere was a recipient of Jill Miller's (UCBerkeley professor of art practice) Being Human artist residency at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2018, and in 2016, she was a finalist for a residency fellowship at the Headlands Center of the Arts. Her paintings will be featured at the SF Art Fair in April 2026 and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Hang Gallery in Fall 2026. Her work is included in many private collections and the following corporate collections:
Bay Area based Healthcare Facility (5 paintings)
Brown Advisory
Chicken and Egg Pictures
Citizens Bank
Freshfields Law Offices of San Francisco
Green17 Design
Mayo Clinic (Integrated Oncology Building, Jacksonville, Florida) (3 paintings)
among others.
Bailliere's work is represented by Hang Art in San Francisco. Please direct inquiries to info@hangart.com.
All artwork ©Alexandra Bailliere, artwork photographed
by Dana Davis.
Portrait photo credit to Anne Sherwood.