Reception: Friday, May 22, 5:30-7:30

“Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America.”
--Dr. Louis A. Zona, Director, The Butler Institute of American A

Santa Fe, NM – As the grand premiere of its spectacular new gallery building just completed in Santa Fe’s historic Railyard district, LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present a major exhibition of work spanning 40 years of the distinguished career of New York artist Ronnie Landfield, one of the great masters of lyrical abstraction and color field painting. Landfield is experiencing a major renaissance of interest, and his canvases provide breathtaking examples of painting in the genre dubbed Post Painterly Abstraction by legendary art critic Clement Greenberg.

The exhibition opens May 22 in the soaring main-floor gallery of LewAllen’s spacious new building and continues through June 21. With more than 30 stunningly beautiful pieces, some monumental in size, the show inaugurates LewAllen’s just-completed 13,000 square foot space in the building designed by architect Devendra Contractor, AIA, and developed for LewAllen by Rose and John Utton, at 1613 Paseo de Peralta, diagonally across from SITE Santa Fe.

The new space is owned by the gallery and joins LewAllen Encantado and LewAllen Downtown as LewAllen Galleries’ third location in Santa Fe.

“We are very proud and honored to inaugurate this amazing new facility with an exhibition of some of the most important work by one of America’s great color abstractionists,” said Kenneth R. Marvel, co-owner of LewAllen. His partner and director of the gallery, Robert R. Gardner, added: “We’ve already heard our new building described as the architectural jewel of the Railyard arts district, and we are pleased that a gallery whose 35 year legacy also includes a downtown Santa Fe landmark going back to the days of Elaine Horwitch can now honor the work of important artists like Ronnie Landfield by adding a museum-like structure in what will surely be an important geographical part of the future of Santa Fe’s arts community.”

LewAllen’s survey of four decades in Landfield’s career follows a major retrospective at The Butler Institute of American Art in 2007 and is the first show of its scope outside a museum. A 24-page full-color catalogue with essay by eminent writer and curator Klaus Kertess accompanies the exhibition and shows leading examples of Landfield’s lyrical abstractions from 1969 to the present.

Landfield’s stature as one of America’s best painters makes him an ideal choice for the Railyard gallery’s inaugural exhibition. His career has been impressive by any standard. He participated in his first Whitney annual in 1967, at age 20, and was included again in the biennials of 1969 and 1973. By 1969 he had fully integrated the technique of staining into his oeuvre. His painting titled Diamond Lake was enthusiastically purchased in 1969 by Philip Johnson and entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

The exhibition marks an anniversary of sorts for the artist, occurring as it does 40 years after his first solo show in 1969 at the David Whitney Gallery in New York. Two of the earliest works in the exhibition include Shiloh (1969), among the first of his stain paintings to have a vertical band of color, and Growth (1970), whose diffused, feathery stains are reminiscent of those in Diamond Lake, now in MoMA’s collection.

Two paintings from a series begun in 1971, Garden of Delight and Lucia’s Arabian Dance, are “seminal paintings,” according to the artist. Each painting in this series employed a variety of strategies in the way paint was handled: stains, geometric bands on the side and on the bottom, thick paint scraped on with a knife and a sponge, spatters flung onto the canvas like Jackson Pollock, and paint very freely brushed on. Garden of Delight also was initially purchased by Philip Johnson, who installed it in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, where it hung from 1975 to 1984. Johnson later gifted it to his friend, the artist, in admiration for Landfield’s distinguished career.

Another important painting in this show is Jack of Hearts, completed in 1979, which Landfield considers to be “presciently reminiscent” of work he is doing today. Landfield calls it and others of its sort his “empirical” work, in contrast to his “organic” or “organically produced” work. The empirical paintings, such as Jack of Hearts and more recent paintings including Big Trane (1998), feature drawn shapes, made with the brush on a field of stain, painted rapidly and very wet. Landfield explains, “With an empirical painting, I’m painting this, next to this, next to this – there’s intention to it – whereas with the organic paintings they’re forming themselves and I’m just allowing it to happen.”

In the mid-eighties, Landfield made mostly organic stain paintings with bands both vertical and horizontal. An example in the exhibition is On the Threshold (1985). For Landfield, a deeply contemplative man, these paintings are suffused with a sense of spirituality and the mystic. “I was really operating by instinct,” he explains. “Things had so radically changed in the art world by the mid-eighties. There was a retrograde return to figuration, a retrograde return to Pop Art, and things happening in the East Village that appeared to have nothing to do with what had gone before. … To keep going, you had to really care about it; you had to justify the meaning of what you were doing.”

Landfield next did a body of work he calls “history” paintings because they included all his painting strategies. They are exemplified by two paintings from 1992, including one titled Accompanied by Angels. His next series, in the mid-nineties, were pure stain paintings with no additions – just the stain, organically produced, as in Journey to the East, from 1994. Continuing from the late nineties to 2009, Landfield’s work utilized the combination of strategies presaged by Jack of Hearts. Each luminous stained canvas is empirically produced and strongly suggestive of landscapes with vast skies over a low horizon. A prime example is Love Is at the Core, from 2004.

Landfield is famous for his abstracted landscapes, though when he began producing them he didn’t think of them as landscapes but as “paintings, period.” In rejecting a Greenbergian focus on the picture plane, he consciously created foreground, middle ground and background; and he now says, “It’s clear after many years that there is a relationship to landscape. These are landscapes of the mind. They are landscapes informed by emotion and feeling rather than by the way things actually look.”

Landfield has written of his art: “If my paintings seem to be optimistic and spiritual and to express the inner core of the human soul it is to that intention that they are meant. I would become unnecessary as an artist if I ever forgot the power and the fragility and the beauty of the human spirit.”

One look at the LewAllen exhibition makes apparent how necessary Landfield’s art remains. Landfield’s paintings are part of important collections, such as the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney in New York City; the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC; the Walker Art Center in Minnesota; the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others. In 2008, 14 of his paintings entered museums as gifts from The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection’s Fifty Works for Fifty States program, bringing the total museums with his paintings to more than 40.