A Shape-Shifting Show Fits Perfectly Into This Oddly Proportioned SF Gallery

There’s something classically San Francisco about the Market Street storefront currently occupied by the gallery 1599fdT. Narrow and long, with unnecessarily high ceilings, the space is an ad hoc assemblage of inexplicable architectural details.

Above the entry, an angular arch of windows is abbreviated six panes into its expected eight. At the back of the gallery, the ceiling suddenly drops to a meager six feet, creating a cave-like zone for owner and director Facundo Argañaraz during his Friday and Saturday open hours.

These physical quirks are well met by Dimensions Variable, an exhibition of late-2000s work by the Berlin artist Alexander Wolff. Wolff’s painted and dyed pieces on cotton, canvas and linen are endlessly modular. Made up of three to eight separate sections, they fasten together with buttons, Velcro and safety pins.

When the entire show of eight pieces arrived in one small carry-on bag, Argañaraz thought it would be an easy hang. But some of the best things take time. Two days of unfolding and repositioning later, the final presentation of Dimensions Variable fits within 1599fdT like another layer of paint, gracefully arranging itself along the gallery’s vertical planes.

Actually, “final presentation” isn’t quite accurate. These works could change yet again. The dimensions are very variable.

One of three pieces titled Détournement is a case in point. The show’s brightest work, it channels Italian beach umbrellas with red-and-white striped sections. It’s displayed at 1599fdT in a splayed shape, almost like an animal skin hanging on the wall. But on the image list, it resembles an open-bottomed rectangle, its striped and solid sections creating their own repeating U-shaped pattern. With just a few moves, this artwork has assumed a different character altogether.

Imagine changing an outfit completely while wearing the exact same clothes.

Safety Pins, hanging over the gallery desk thanks to that low, low ceiling, becomes horizontal in this staging. Its overlapping sections of siena brown and splotchy gray are arranged in up-down crenelations, forming a kind of abstract landscape. On the image list it contracts into a solid siena box, the gray sections now reading like tire tracks extending outward.

In Wolff’s hands, rectilinear, raw-edged pieces of cloth become building blocks, responding to and acting on the odd architecture that surrounds them. And at 1599fdT, rectangles abound: a deep nook by the front window, a slight relief on one wall that meets the ceiling, the thick bump-out of a column that conceals the art that hangs behind it.

That semi-hidden piece is revealed as another Détournement, a showstopper of grayscale stripes arranged around a dark starburst, everything connected with large, costume jewelry–like gold buttons.

Comparing the show’s image list to the works’ current orientation becomes a bit of a game. This one has stretched into a solid vertical. That one has flipped on its axis, fitting perfectly over that slight relief.

There are so many ways this show could have been put together, and yet it feels as if it is the perfect show for this particular space. This storefront is itself just one iteration of 1599fdT, which has existed, at different times, at 1599 Tennessee St., 620 Kearny St. and now, 1912 Market St.

Some day, 1912 Market St. will become the container for something else, and another tenant will grapple with the puzzle of who cut up this storefront, and why. But I can’t imagine it holding anything quite like this show: a perfect representation of the shape-shifting flexibility that’s required to inhabit — and succeed in — a city.

‘Dimensions Variable’ is on view through Sept. 20, 2025 at 15599fdT (1912 Market St.).