Ronnie Landfield: After the Rain
Exhibition: September 6 - October 13, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10-6, Sat 10-5, Sun by appt.

Santa Fe, NM — Opening on September 6 and running through October 13, 2013 at its Railyard location, LewAllen Galleries presents Ronnie Landfield: After the Rain, an exhibition of work by celebrated New York Colorfield painter Ronnie Landfield.

After the Rain commemorates the personal and professional ordeal survived by the artist in the wake of the devastation and destruction of Hurricane Sandy that struck New York with such calamitous force on October 29, 2012. The old building on Desbrosses Street, one block away from the Hudson River in downtown Manhattan, that had served since 1969 as Landfield’s home and studio was flooded within minutes. Scores of works by the artist whose paintings, prints and drawings are installed in more than 40 museums and public collections, were engulfed in three feet of water: a surging, uncontainable threat to a half-century’s span of extraordinary artistic production. Trapped by the rising waters and helpless to try and rescue his work, the artist and his wife waited for the 1,000-mile-wide monster to subside.

In its aftermath Landfield, like many other New Yorkers, has endured a modern-day ordeal full of gargantuan effort, deprivation, despair and even a legal battle to fight an attempt to use against him the adversity of a hurricane as premise for eviction from his rent-controlled home and studio of 44 years. Happily, however, countless hours of uncertain labor have been rewarded by the successful rescue of a lifetime of art. The artist, his wife and sons have retrieved monumental paintings from the edge of muck and mold, paper work and canvases have been meticulously treated with alcohol and disinfectant, alternative storage has been searched for and found, endless caches of art and archives have been shuttled to drier places.

The zeal and unrelenting sacrifice made by the artist to see his art endure has been nothing short of heroic. “I just hope that all the work in my studio survives this monstrosity,” Landfied said shortly after the storm had passed. This hope has sustained him, and through it all he and his art have indeed survived. Perhaps Landfield’s words in 2001 were both prophetic and prescriptive: “As an artist the faith required to make visible and to express the inexpressible prepares you to accept the unacceptable and embrace the unknown.” The artist has not only embraced his lot of having weathered the unacceptable, but at the end of the day he smiles and says, “In a way we’re all lucky.”

The artist is now in the fifth decade of his career as an American master of Lyrical and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He has helped to define the evolution and continuing legacy of abstraction in the 20th century. Finding inspiration in sources such as Sung Dynasty Chinese landscape painting, Landfield utilizes large fields of flat color spread across or stained into the canvas, creating lavish surfaces. As he employs subtle gradients of hue, canvas scale, and intensity, color is then released from objective context and becomes the subject itself. Loose broad landscapes of paint application and arcs of joyous color create poetic scenes to captivate the viewer. The artist himself would not describe his works as necessarily landscapes, however. Often he will utilize a bold band of high-keyed color at the bottom or side of a painting to indicate that the work is not a recognizable scene—a balancing act of intuitive brushwork and a subjective groundedness. Landfield says of his own work, “Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape as a metaphor for the arena of life.…I sense a visual music that externalizes what I feel within me and in the air.”

Landfield was invited to participate in his first exhibition at the Whitney in 1967, at age 20, and was included again in the Whitney annuals of 1969 and 1973. He had his first solo show in 1969 at the David Whitney Gallery in New York. In 1969, Landfield also was awarded the William and Noma Copley (Cassandra) Foundation Grant in painting. By the age of 22, Landfield’s place in art history was already secure. Notably, Landfield’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among numerous other distinguished institutions. Dr. Louis A Zona of the Butler Collection defined Landfield as, “pure and simple, one of the greatest painters working in America today.”