Ronnie Landfield "the 40th Anniversary" Exhibition
Stephen Haller Gallery
This event has ended.
Starting his studies at the Woodstock Art Students League at 15 he later crisscrossed the country, from his native New York to the heartland; on the West Coast he hitchhiked to Berkeley, paintbrushes in his pocket. Returning to New York Landfield became one of the original Bowery artists and moved into a studio there during the summer of love.
Ronnie Landfield was the youngest of his youthquake generation of artists and he was about to take on New York. It was 1969 and his luminous paintings had already been exhibited in museum exhibitions such as the Whitney Annual (later Biennial). He was about to have his first solo exhibition in New York at the David Whitney Gallery. Ronnie Landfield: the 40th Anniversary
Exhibition celebrates the 40th anniversary of that first solo show.
That first exhibition sold out with four works going to major museums: MoMA, the Whitney, the Bavarian State Museum in Germany, and the Hirshhorn. Since then Landfield has had over 60 solo exhibitions around the world, his work is included in the collections of more than 40 museums and public collections.
During the nearly five decades of his career Ronnie Landfield has stayed true to his course as a painter of soaring veils of color. Louis Zona, Director of the Butler Institute of American Art wrote: “To stand in front of a Landfield painting is to be transported into a world where color feeds upon color and every inch of the canvas is considered.”
Art critic Karen Wilkin wrote of Landfield’s recent paintings that they were: “first and foremost about the way someone in love with the liquidity and chromatic richness of paint moves his chosen medium across a canvas, but they also evoked idyllic landscapes— a vision of the Golden Age extrapolated, perhaps, from Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre and translated into pure color and gesture.”
Again in the words of Zona: “Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America.”
[Image: Ronnie Landfield "The Rising Sun" (1996) Acrylic on canvas, 74 x 91 in.]
Media
Schedule
from October 22, 2009 to November 28, 2009