NYAB Event - Johnnie Winona Ross “Traces: Paintings”

Johnnie Winona Ross “Traces: Paintings”

57 STUX + HALLER Gallery

[Image: Johnnie Winona Ross "Seep - 8" (2013) minerals and pigments on linen, 36 x 34 in.]

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Stux + Haller presents Johnnie Winona Ross: Traces, the 9th solo exhibition of the artist with Haller and his first at the new Stux + Haller 24 West 57th Street space.

Johnnie Winona Ross grounds his luminous minimalist paintings in the inspiration of the desert of the American Southwest, and borrows techniques from ancient Native American sources, burnishing pigment and minerals with a potter’s stone to create a hard surface of translucent depth. This creates an effect for his meditative paintings that is reminiscent of the softening of marble steps. He melds this process with a distinctly sophisticated and utterly contemporary vision.

Washington Post critic Stephen Parks characterizes Ross’s work in this way: “From a distance his canvases appear to be simple, minimal constructions of horizontal stripes with hints of vertical color in the background. Up close, the paintings are seen to be extraordinarily beautiful and complex objects that induce a humming meditative state.” And Ross states: “I try to produce a physical object which is extra-ordinary from one’s everyday life. An object that transcends the physical.”

In his foreword to the monograph Johnnie Winona Ross, Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, writes:
“These paintings embody two worlds: one a realm of serene order; the other more unpredictable, a place prone to accident and surprise encounter. The balancing of divergent realms, fraught with tension, is a salient characteristic of this work, where temporal forces, like imaginary rivers glimpsed from the heavens, surge beneath plains of pure light.”

And critic Carter Ratcliff writes: “What gives his vision its character, finally, is the brilliance with which he integrates minutiae with overall structures…Ross’s art gives us an opportunity to feel an exhilarated engagement with the moment.”