SOCO Gallery

About the Gallery
Southern Comfort Gallery (SOCO) is a contemporary art gallery and bookshop in Charlotte, North Carolina. Established in 2015 by Chandra Johnson, the women-owned and operated space strives to bring museum-quality artists and artwork to their local community and lead the conversation in the Southeast in contemporary art. SOCO Gallery regularly exhibits regional emerging talent and is proud of their connection to the national and international art world.

Located in a renovated 1920’s bungalow in historic Myers Park, SOCO Gallery provides a thoughtful platform for contemporary art to be experienced, discussed, and acquired.  The gallery specializes in assisting private collectors, institutions, and corporations to build their collections with artworks from emerging to mid-career artists. Community engagement and education are central to the mission of the gallery, regularly presenting artist talks and seminars with each exhibition. In June of 2021, SOCO opened SOCO Annex, a space adjacent to the gallery which allows for dual exhibition programming as well as performances and installations. 

About the Presentation
SOCO Gallery will debut at Independent with a solo presentation featuring work by Matt Kleberg. Kleberg is a San Antonio–based artist whose oilstick paintings use architectural and ornamental abstraction to create layered, spatial compositions that feel simultaneously inviting and inaccessible, emphasizing tension between barrier and entry. Drawing from sources ranging from Renaissance altarpieces to 19th-century tramp art, his structured yet empty frames and niches resist pure abstraction and instead evoke an iconography of doubt, absence, and the shaping of perception. Kleberg's work functions metaphorically, reflecting human relationships and contemporary conditions of disappearance, borders, and emotional constraint.