Catharine Clark Gallery is proud to present Gil Batle’s Almost sanctuary, the artist’s debut exhibition in the gallery’s main space, on view from July 26 to September 27, 2025. Born in 1962 in San Francisco to Filipino parents, Batle spent 20 years in and out of five different California prisons for fraud and forgery before relocating to a small island in the Philippines. During his incarceration, Batle developed a self-taught drawing practice that evolved into sophisticated and clandestine tattooing skills, offering him protection in some of California’s most violent prisons. These formative experiences now emerge in his artwork, rendered with minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich eggshells, clay, and paper.

Batle’s carved ostrich eggs depict surreal visions of memories from his struggles with incarceration and his search for freedom. Symbols of shanks, chains, barbed wire, locks, and birds interweave with recollections of fellow inmates and events he witnessed. “I actually have to go back (mentally) to prison to capture that feel of being inside that place,” Batle writes, reflecting on both the trauma of incarceration and the gratitude of survival. While headlines often reduce prison life to snapshots of abuse, Batle’s work chronicles the deeper complexities: the violence, mistakes, bonds, and resilience of those who lived inside. His practice transforms painful memory into intricate visual storytelling, imbuing delicate materials with histories of endurance.

The exhibition also includes hand-painted blue-and-white ceramic plates and glass trophies made of shattered whiskey bottles. Inspired by Japanese porcelain and his own battle with addiction, these works reimagine objects of fragility and destruction as vehicles of reflection and survival. Scenes on the plates fuse island landscapes with figures from Batle’s past, while the glass trophies stand as testaments to overcoming addiction, their etched surfaces echoing motifs found in his carved ostrich eggs. Across these bodies of work, Batle’s Almost sanctuary transforms difficult lived experience into a meditation on survival, freedom, and the power of creative resilience.