Solo Exhibition Series: Jan Wurm

The Guards

Curated by Tamar Khelashvili

In The Guards, Jan Wurm brings together paintings and drawings that explore the subtle tensions between protection and vulnerability, authority and uncertainty. Her figures stand at thresholds — between spaces, between people, between acts of seeing and being seen.

The guards of Wurm’s world are not soldiers or sentinels, but human presences caught in moments of quiet vigilance. Through expressive brushwork and sensitive line, she reveals the psychological weight of watchfulness — how we guard not only borders and bodies, but also emotions, memories, and truths.

Each work invites reflection on what it means to hold a position, to observe, to defend. The exhibition becomes a meditation on control and fragility, on the spaces we keep and those we allow to open.

In Wurm’s vision, the guard is everywhere — and perhaps, within each of us.

Jan Wurm is an artist, educator, and curator engaged in expanding the community forum for contemporary art dialogue. Having lived in California, where she received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Europe, where she received an M.A.R.C.A. from the Royal College of Art in London, Jan Wurm has honed an eye for social patterns and conventions. She currently divides her time between Berkeley and L.A. and her hand between drawing and painting.

As an artist, Wurm has been engaged by the familiar and challenged by the unknown.

Her paintings, drawings, and artist's books examine daily life to reveal aspects of contemporary culture which inform our relationships. This graphic body of work has spanned time and geography in over a hundred exhibitions in California, New York, Canada, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Italy. Wurm has been the recipient of five grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and a commission from the Del Sol String Quartet funded by Chamber Music America.