Sharon Stone returns to San Francisco with new art show

More than 20 years later, Sharon Stone still remembers the moment she died.

In the 181 Fremont gallery atop San Francisco’s South of Market luxury residential building, the Academy Award-nominated actor sits near her painting “The Bridge,” a new work in her show “Sharon Stone: My Eternal Failure.” A dark blue stripe at the top of the canvas is interrupted by brushstrokes that reveal white space underneath, the marks resembling vital signs on a patient monitor or tombstones. At the bottom, stripes of deep red, gray and periwinkle blue are stacked atop one another; at the white center of the painting, a figure emerges, surrounded by licks of yellow. 

“I was in the MRI machine and all these things happened,” recalled Stone, 66, describing her experience when hospitalized for a subarachnoid hemorrhage in September 2001 while living in San Francisco. “Then I came out and I flatlined.” 

“The Bridge,” she said, “is the experience of what that was like when I went and blew up through the white light. I saw all these people that had passed away, and they turned to me and told me how much they loved me, and they were waiting for me.” 

In the painting, Stone is the figure in blue; the yellow brushstrokes her spirit guides. “And then suddenly, I guess, they defibrillated me.” 

Following experimental brain surgery, Stone recovered at the Sea Cliff house she shared with her then-husband, Phil Bronstein, senior vice president and executive editor of the Chronicle at the time, and their baby son, Roan. During that time she said she hallucinated colors, lost hearing in one ear (since regained) and had to learn how to speak again without stuttering. 

Stone said she was also visited by five glowing orbs during her recovery, which she believes were spiritual beings. In “The Bridge,” the five orbs appear toward the top of the painting, showing through the dark blue. 

Eventually, Stone said, she addressed the orbs: “If I’m going to live, you can’t all stay with me. A couple of you have to go and stay with my son.”

All the work exhibited in “My Eternal Failure” is autobiographical and related to Stone’s time in San Francisco. As the title suggests, her years in the city — from her marriage to Bronstein in 1998 to their separation in 2003 (they divorced in 2004) — were not easy. That relationship and the loss of primary custody of Roan are among the failures referenced in the show’s title. 

“I was frightened to come (back) here,” Stone told the Chronicle in her low, resonant voice, the blue eyes that have appeared in close-ups in dozens of films looking down for a moment. In person, the charisma that makes her so watchable onscreen is tempered by an artist’s vulnerability. 

San Francisco is complicated for Stone. While it’s the city where her personal life hit its lowest point, it’s also the setting of “Basic Instinct,” the 1992 erotic thriller by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven that shot her to stardom. While femme fatale Catherine Tramell remains among her best-known roles, her 2021 memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” reveals that making the movie wasn’t easy. (Stone alleges that the infamous up-skirt shot in the interrogation scene was filmed without her consent, but that she ultimately allowed it to be kept in the film.) 

She’s returned to the Bay Area, though, at the beginning of a triumphant new act. “My Eternal Failure” is Stone’s fourth art show in the past 12 months, and her three prior showings in America and Europe have been met with positive reviews. 

Although prices are not available for Stone’s show at 181 Fremont, in October of last year, two of her paintings sold for $250,000 each at the Barrow Neurological Foundation gala auction.

Stone’s paintings are clearly more than a movie star side project. There’s a confidence in the long gestures of her brushwork, strength in the organic quality of her more minimalist works, and a fascinating use of color in her blending of hues and use of contrasting tones as punctuation. 

The title work of the show, which took Stone three years to complete, combines a darkened cityscape with fiery skies, bisected by a blue line and abstract forms crawling across the top of the work. “The Party,” from 2022, features the same chaotic, entwining figures against a black backdrop. But in works like “Bonne Nuit” from 2022 and “Hoisted on My Own Petard” from 2024, there’s an elegance in her forms’ simplicity. 

While it feels like Stone is still experimenting in some of the smaller works that mix in elements of impressionism and abstract expressionism, viewers get the sense that she knows where she’s going as she refines her aesthetic. 

In a New York magazine story about his December 2023 conversation with Stone at the 92nd Street Y cultural center, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz wrote that she “took all of these life events, everything that was taken away, everything that was given, and she learned to breathe and to forgive. In a sort of mystic unraveling, I see an artist, someone living a life in art. Being a freedom machine.”

Art has long been a passion for Stone. Growing up in Meadville, Pa., she painted with her aunt, artist Vonne Stone, and studied art and creative writing at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania before leaving to pursue modeling and acting in New York. 

Stone’s movie breakthrough came at age 34 with “Basic Instinct,” and for a decade, she was among the biggest female stars in Hollywood. She was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” 

“I read a quote from Sharon saying back in the 1990s, the two most famous female celebrities were her and Princess Diana,” said Matthew Lituchy, chief investment officer at Jay Paul Co., the developer of 181 Fremont presenting the show. “She’s quite right.”

Following her divorce, Stone moved back to Los Angeles, adopted sons Laird and Quinn, and continued acting, as well as working as a prolific fundraiser for HIV-AIDS organizations. She began painting again when she returned to college in 2016, completing her bachelor’s degree in art at Edinboro. 

But it was during the pandemic when her painting practice kicked into high gear. Stone now works with a studio assistant, Zach Megalis, and devotes much of her time to visual art. 

“My Eternal Failure” follows Stone’s show “Welcome to My Garden,” which was presented at Los Angeles’ Allouche Gallery in the spring of 2023 and built upon for a fall showing at C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, Conn. Her first European show, “Totem,” opened at Galerie Deschler in Berlin in February.

Lituchy, who met Stone through a mutual friend, said he pursued a 181 Fremont show with her for a year. 

“I think it was meaningful for her to come back to San Francisco in such a glorious way,”  said Lituchy. “That time was filled with so many mixed emotions. This is sort of her coming-out party, if you will.”

Following the opening reception for the show on April 10, guest Robert Huw Morgan of San Francisco said he was impressed with the range of Stone’s visual vocabulary. 

“Within the realm of acrylic, she manages to achieve so many results, which are all so beautifully painterly,” said Huw Morgan, the university organist at Stanford’s Memorial Church. “No gesture is without thought. Even in those paintings with a repeated gesture, everything is in the right place.”

It may have taken two decades since her “Eternal Failure” in San Francisco, but Stone too is finally in the right place. Through her new life as an artist, she has exorcised the ghosts of the city and found a new joy.

“Happiness is really my discipline,” said Stone. “You have to decide to be happy and then you have to make sure you stay happy.”

Reach Tony Bravo: tbravo@sfchronicle.com