Standout Pieces: San Francisco’s January Art Fairs

January is a busy time for art events in San Francisco, most notable being FOG Fair – our favorite design event of the year. This year’s lineup featured a mix of contemporary paintings, fiber art, collectible furniture and sculptures from local and international galleries. New on the scene in 2026 is Atrium Fair hosted at the renowned Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. Atrium showcased a lively mix of artists—emerging and mid-career painters and sculptors alongside mixed-media works. The fair also featured designers and craft artists whose work straddles fine art and functional object, making Atrium especially appealing to interior designers and private collectors seeking accessible, collectible pieces. We attended both fairs and discovered some exciting new local artists and found a few incredible pieces for our San Francisco interior design clients.

One of my favorite artists showing at Atrium was Carmen McNall, whose vibrant, graphic pieces had incredible energy and presence. Carmen McNall is an Oakland-based artist whose work blends bold color, textured surfaces, and layered materials to create pieces that feel both intimate and expansive. McNall’s work is deeply informed by a background in printmaking; the discipline’s emphasis on mark-making, negative space, and repetition shows up across her practice. Complementing those roots, McNall frequently uses carving and incising directly into painted surfaces, subtracting as much as she adds. With blades, gouges, or palette knives she scores through paint to reveal underlayers, creating raw linear passages and textured furrows.

Active in Oakland’s arts community, McNall participates in local exhibitions, pop-up shows, and collaborative projects that foreground neighborhood stories and collective creativity. She frequently engages with public programming—artist talks, workshops, and community residencies—and her practice reflects a commitment to accessibility and dialogue. McNall’s work is represented at Eleanor Harwood Gallery.

Henna Vainio (Finland, b.1981) earned her MFA from The Slade School of Art, London, and her BFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London and is currently represented at Casemore Gallery. Vainio’s recent ceramic works focus on language in the form of word stacks. In language, understanding, imagination, and meaning intersect as we read, write, speak, and listen from beginning to end. In Vainio’s word stacks, the linear is disrupted as beginning and end are compressed in spacetime. The message becomes nearly impossible to decipher, but the letters remain with their message becoming nearly infinite.

Egeværk is a design studio based in Elsinore, Denmark, established by cabinetmakers Mette Bentzen and Lasse Kristensen and represented at Hostler Burrows. Trained at the rigorous Danish joinery PP Møbler, Bentzen and Kristensen develop hand-carved furniture and lighting inspired by the natural forms and muted tones of the Scandinavian landscape. Egeværk’s måne series of delicately carved moons summon visions of the palely-lit twilight of deep winter in the Nordic region. Embodying the waxing-waning edge of the moon’s cycle through bare wood and black-stained panels of Danish ash illuminated by internal LEDs, each sculpture bears the name of one of dozens of planetary moons across the solar system.

Emil Lukas is an artist I discovered at last year’s FOG Fair – we recently placed one of his incredible thread pieces in our client’s Hillsborough home. Lukas is known for his distinctive abstract works that explore material, process, and repetition, most notably through his celebrated thread pieces. Lukas meticulously winds, layers, and builds thread onto sculptural forms. The resulting compositions blur the line between painting and sculpture, emphasizing accumulation, time, and the physical act of making. Through subtle shifts in color, tension, and texture, Lukas’s thread pieces invite close viewing and reward patience, revealing a quiet intensity and a deep engagement with process as both concept and form. You can find his work at Hosfelt Gallery.

In the foreground above you can see three metal sculptures by Harry Bertoia – an Italian-born American sculptor best known for his innovative metal sculptures and iconic mid-century furniture designs. Trained as an artist, Bertoia moved fluidly between fine art and design, creating works that emphasized form, structure, and sensory experience. His metal sculptures are celebrated for their ability to merge structure, movement, and sound into elegant, organic forms. Often made from welded steel rods or bronze, these works feel simultaneously architectural and lyrical, with delicate lines that seem to vibrate in space.

Camilla Moberg’s stunning handblown glass, stone and aluminum light sculpture might have been my favorite piece at FOG Fair. Moberg studied fine art and design in Finland, where her sensibility was shaped by Nordic traditions of minimalism, craftsmanship, and a close relationship to nature. Moberg is widely recognized for her glass light sculptures, which combine sculptural form with a soft, atmospheric glow. These works are typically handblown or cast, embracing organic shapes and subtle irregularities that highlight the human hand in the making process. Her works are made in Nuutajärvi, the oldest glass village in Finland, in collaboration with renowned Finnish glassblowers. Represented at Paris’s Maria Wettergren Galerie.

Susie Taylor (b. 1967, Fort Collins, CO) weaves abstract and dimensional textiles that explore the tactile architecture of the loom and the shifting behavior of color. Her geometric abstractions, some reminiscent of architectural forms, investigate the interplay of color, texture, and visual dimension. Taylor’s fiber pieces transform materials such as rope, cotton, and thread into layered, dimensional forms through knotting, wrapping, stitching, and binding. The works feel both grounded and organic, inviting close inspection and an awareness of the hand at work. Available through Johansson Projects.