ROY DOWELL 2024

ROY DOWELL

ROY DOWELL

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

THE REAL THING

By David Pagel

Roy Dowell makes paintings because he wants to see things he has never seen.

That’s the opposite of what visionaries do when they paint or draw: They report back on what they’ve seen in their imaginations—or dreams—by bringing those images and stories to life. The resulting works attest to the singularity, perspicacity, and insightfulness of their visions, which some believe spring from the unconscious and others locate in more spiritual, yet similarly unfathomable, sources.

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What Dowell does in the studio is also the opposite of what Realists do when they make art: Realists take viewers beyond surface appearances to capture what they believe to be the underlying truth of the world, giving the situations and circumstances they address more clarity than we would have without the help of their insistent, unflinching works, which are sometimes incisive, are often ugly, and are always unforgiving.

Dowell, on the other hand, gives shape in his paintings to a world he has not previously seen or imagined—or even fantasized about, in his wildest dreams. That’s pretty ambitious. But there’s nothing excessive, far-fetched, outlandish, unbelievable, or even fanciful about Dowell’s blunt, down-to-earth works, which are approachable, unpresuming, and forthright. When Dowell makes a painting, he doesn’t make anything up. Everything, in every last one of the intimately scaled works on paper that he has been making for the last two years, seems to have been found, borrowed, and repurposed—sourced from the world around us. He makes use of the reality anyone (and everyone) can see if they pay attention to the visual phenomena that are commonly thought to belong to the image glut of modern life—an overwhelming,

incessant, and inconceivably vast assault on our eyeballs, never mind our minds and sensibilities, that has intensified and expanded exponentially since the digital phase of the information age hit us like a tsunami about forty years ago.

The shapes in Dowell’s paintings are as simple as simple can be: rectangles, triangles, and circles, almost always drawn by hand but occasionally made with the help of a ruler. (Sometimes a square sneaks into the picture, but, because Dowell eyeballs his shapes, their sides are rarely the same length, so even the ones that appear to be squares are, strictly speaking, not true squares.) Even preschoolers are familiar with the basic shapes that are Dowell’s bread and butter, able to recognize them well before they learn the word “geometry,” or know anything about that branch of math. And, like many grammar school exercises, which are repeated until their lessons become second nature, repetition is Dowell’s stock-in-trade, his modus operandi, his superpower.

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Sometimes Dowell doubles triangles to make diamonds, which he repeats to form patterns that might be opaque or translucent or both. Their alternating shapes block out portions of what he had previously painted while letting us glimpse what once covered the work’s surface, or at least a good portion of it. Dowell puts circles to similar uses. In some works, he abuts coin- or baseball-size circles, with the circumference of one circle just kissing the circumference of another, and so on and so forth, until a string of discs—never orbs—is suggested. In other works, he lays out smaller circles, like the ones that appear on dice or dominoes, creating patterned planes that appear to hover just in front of the fields and the shapes behind them or appear to punch through the picture plane and open onto surfaces further off in the distance, perhaps walls, windows, or deep, dark wells. Sometimes, his arrangements of circles appear to extend beyond one or more of the edges of his abstract compositions, suggesting an expansive and more or less uniform pattern.

At other times, these patterns inhabit just a section of the overall composition, punctuating the whole with DIY punctuation marks—idiosyncratic, self-styled glyphs that interrupt your effort to “read” the piece as a resolved and harmonious whole, as a singular thing, or as a consistent, same-all-the-way-through work of art.

Seurat, Georges A Sunday on La Grande Jette, 1884 Oil on canvas, 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 inches, 207.5 x 308.1 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

In still other works, Dowell inscribes circles within circles, constructing concentric rings that recall targets and mandalas and, in some instances, street signs, albeit for a world whose traffic patterns bear little resemblance to our own and whose signs seem to mark journeys far off the beaten path. Some of these segmented circles sit still, like the icons in shrines that believers set up in their homes or their more modern versions, icons that appear on the screens that everyone uses and that, with a single click, deliver people from all walks of life through digital portals that open onto other worlds where our powers are enhanced by the invisible software and complex hardware that we can make use of without understanding how they work.

Other segmented circles in Dowell’s works seem to spin, like pinwheels or windmills or scientific devices—rotoscoping, in the mind’s eye, while reflecting what our eyeballs do when we look at his imaginatively animated works: circle around and spiral across their meticulously engineered surfaces, skittering and jumping, bumping up against some things and doubling back to revisit others, dancing and leaping as your imagination is drawn into the action that has attracted your eyes, well before your brain has had a chance to catch up with the bodily pleasures that have been orchestrated. In addition to all of that, Dowell treats circles as if they are dots, but his are too meaty and too messy to be the one-dimensional points we know from geometry. The dots in his works are more like handmade versions of what dot-matrix printers once churned out, or the love children of Pointillist paintings from the 1880s and comic strips from a Sunday newspaper from the 1960s.

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Color plays an equally important part in Dowell’s art, rivaling shape in significance, ingenuity, and impact. Like the shapes that make up his compositions, his palette is simple: the primaries (red, blue, and yellow), plus the secondaries (green and orange, with pink replacing purple), along with black, white, and brown. Black is often, but not always, used for outlines. Most important, none of Dowell’s colors is uniform.

Just about every shape in every painting is made of many washy veils of Flashe, a vinyl-based paint known for its almost chalky finish. Flashe absorbs light like no other paint, swallowing up glossiness and the reflections glossy surfaces generate in the same way that black holes swallow up everything within their gravitational pull. The magic of Flashe is that it allows for colors to be intense and dry, radiant and sunbaked, soft but not faded. People usually describe intense colors as being supersaturated. But that language is too linked to liquidity to capture the powdery presence of surfaces covered with Flashe.

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And Dowell takes Flashe to extremes, often thinning his paints with so much water that each layer, when it dries, is translucent, like a veil or whiff of tinted air. He also applies layer upon layer upon layer, often shifting the colors of each wash subtly and with great nuance. A single section of a painting, which may appear, at first, to be uniform, consistent, and homogenous, actually consists of dozens, if not hundreds, of miniscule shifts in tint and tone. The density and impact of each slips, unpredictably, as your eyes glide across the surfaces of his works. At other times, Dowell goes for more dramatic shifts when he adds a new layer of paint, jumping across the spectrum. Whether those moves are from dark to light or light to dark, the most recently applied color is affected by the colors that lie beneath it, which haunt it like ghosts or resonate like echoes. Sometimes Dowell locks down a composition by eliminating details and blocking out a large or small section, like an edit that makes everything more concise, spot-on, or point-blank. But more often, he dials down his colors as he paints layer after layer. This necessitates slow reads rather than fast takes, satisfyingly long looks rather than swift glances.

Dowell is a connoisseur of inconsistency. Marshaling visual jumps, color shifts, and compositional disruptions, he makes disparate things play well with one another— against very long odds. His paintings are electrified by the precariousness of the

endeavor. There is a sense that the beauty he has cobbled together is hard-won— that it could have crumbled at any step along the way and that it had better be enjoyed, right here and right now, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll come across it again. Even if you do, you’ll probably see it differently, experience it in a new way. This is where wisdom enters the equation, endowing Dowell’s modest works with a kind of existential impact that is belied by their size, not to mention the materials and the humble handiwork he brings to them.

The basic shapes in Dowell’s paintings play so well with one another that many merge, cross-pollinate, and mutate. In short, they carry on all kinds of visual intercourse with single and multiple partners, both sensibly and promiscuously, playfully and purposefully. And it seems that they do so just because they can—for no other reason than the fun of it. In any case, their freewheeling, catch-as-catchcan interactions result in lively compositions that are a pleasure to see, again and again. This is precisely because so many of their components can be paired with other components, this way and that, temporarily and with no strings attached.

What seemed simple, still, and serene is all of that and a whole lot more: complex and fluid, labile and animate. It can be rearranged, in the mind’s eye, over and over again. In Dowell’s hands, circles sometimes combine with lines, both curved and clustered—like plant stems and buds, like arabesques and asterisks—to make organic shapes, like spores or snowflakes, like fronds and flowers, like vines and pine trees.

In a handful of works, unrecognizable letters and unidentifiable digits appear in the background or foreground, their silhouettes intimating an illegible language—one we might read, if only we were familiar with its alphabet and grammar.

Just over a third of the works in Dowell’s current suite of paintings follow, fairly freely, the format of still lifes: tabletop views of stacked and clustered items, perhaps fruits and vegetables, bowls and cannisters, vases and flowers, condiment containers and decorative centerpieces. But such interpretations are always open to doubt— and to other, subsequent impressions. None can be nailed down with any sort of certainty. Everything is open to reinterpretation. Revisions happen as a matter of course.

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About a third of Dowell’s works contain patterns piled atop one another. All appear homemade, even funky. Some seem chaotic until you tap into their visual rhythms, which pulse like bass lines or flow like undercurrents, through their overlapping, interacting shapes. The vast majority of the circular, rectangular, and triangular shapes that make up the components of Dowell’s idiosyncratic patterns are translucent, leaving ghostly traces of other layers, other shapes, other patterns. It’s a peculiar version of collage; it’s not cut-and-paste juxtaposition so much as interwoven strands, like threads that make fabrics or reeds that make baskets.

Dowell uses translucence as a multiplier: His works are made up of more than one surface—often three or four, sometimes five, six, or seven. And no bedrock lies behind his multi-surfaced works: Everything that matters is visible on the surface, because that is all anyone has access to. No secrets, hidden meanings, or coded messages are present or suggested. Likewise, Dowell’s works never pretend to begin with blank slates or with fantasies of virgin states to be conquered, controlled, and owned. His art is not about dominion in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, everything in his patient and painstakingly reworked compositions is a matter of adjusting well-used shapes, of mixing impure colors, and of calibrating part-by-part compositions. Everything has been resourcefully resourced and transformed into something filled with so many possibilities that the question of whether it is new or original becomes irrelevant, beside the point, even silly. Whether a composition works is all that matters. And Dowell’s works work, stimulating interest and exciting the imagination, 24/7/365.

The third and slightly smaller group of Dowell’s works might be described as the oddballs if all of his works weren’t so odd, so eccentric, so radically individuated.

This last group of works consists, predominantly, of two-part set-ups. They are not so much diptychs as compositions divided into two parts: Some are set off by pennant-like triangles, and others are constructed from a kind of mirrored doubling— like cells undergoing mitosis or objects visible alongside their reflections in a mirror.

Even though there’s an iconic quality to almost all of Dowell’s compositions, it’s an off-center, off-balance, cock-eyed set-up: Neither authoritarian nor static, the icons in Dowell’s images require neither worship nor subservience, neither homage nor awe. What they require is attentiveness and focus, both concentration and being

fully present, but only so you can see—and experience—how generative and openended they are.

In the same way that Dowell’s shapes merge and mutate, his three formats—tabletop still lifes, piled-up patterns, and diptych-style doublings—also merge and mutate.

Patterns pop up in still lifes. Mirrored imagery appears in patterns. And all manner of doubling—and doubling-back—occurs just about everywhere, creating a body of work that is impossible to divide into tidy, hard-and-fast categories or cut-and-dried subsets. That, in a sense, is the point of everything Dowell does: to get us to see connections between and among seemingly disparate things; to discover relationships between and among otherwise unrecognizable or unnameable things; and to find ourselves in the midst of it all, searching and seeking and finding pleasure and meaning on our own terms, over and over again. Although you know that there’s no such thing as Visionary Realism, Dowell makes you feel that such antithetical approaches to art making may not be such strange bedfellows after all, especially in the hands of an artist whose works are so adept at defying expectations and getting us to see things we’ve never seen.

David Pagel is an art critic, curator, and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University. His reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art issues., Flash Art, and Art in America. Recent publications include Jim Shaw, Lund Humphries, London, 2019 and Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity, Zero+, Claremont, 2018, as well as monographs on Ted Larsen (Radius Books) and Augustine Kofie (Zero+), and catalog essays on Jay DeFeo, Brenda Goodman, Gajin Fujita, and Dion Johnson. Recent exhibitions Pagel organized include “Brown Letham: Passion and Paradox (and a little night music),” and “tbd: Jay Erker, Tony Larson, John Mills, Holly Perez, Marissa Reyes, and Jenny Ziomek.” Pagel is currently working on a book on John Sonsini, scheduled to be published in 2024. A self-taught diorama builder and an avid cyclist, Pagel is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.

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Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

ROY DOWELL Born in Bronxville, NY in 1951 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Mexico City, Mexico

2017 1969 Gallery, New York, NY

EDUCATION

2016 “Mosaics,” Tif Sigfrids Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Little Tree,” Proxy Paris @Galerie Ygrec, Paris, France “New Work,” James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA

1975 Master of Fine Arts, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2014 “New Paintings and Sculptures,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY

1973 Bachelor of Fine Arts, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2013 James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA Proxy Gallery, Culver City, CA

1971 California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2022 The Landing, Los Angeles, CA Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2019 “Found in Translation,” Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “Some of Me and the Sum of Others,” as-is.la, Los Angeles, CA

2012 “Speaking in Tongues,” Galería Nina Menocal, Mexico City, Mexico 2010 “New Work,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY 2009 “New Works on Paper,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2006 “A Survey Exhibition 1981-2005,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2004 “New Works,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2001 “New Works,” Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio, TX

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2000 “like love, built on precedent,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1999 Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY 1997 Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1995 Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Fawbush Gallery, New York, NY 1994 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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1993 “Roy Dowell, Collages,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA “Roy Dowell, with Nancy Evans,” Fawbush Gallery, New York, NY 1991 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1990 “Truth or Consequences,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1989 “Selected Works 1980–1988,” Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA 1988 “The Grand Order of Things,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1987 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1986 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1983 “Roy Dowell, with Peter Levinson,” Roy Boyd Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1982 “Roy Dowell,” Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA 1976 Comsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2022 “We Are LA: Art from the Fredrick Weisman Art Foundation,” Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA 2021 “Abstract Vocabularies,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA 2020 “Feedback” (curated by Helen Molesworth), Jack Shainman Gallery: The School, Kinderhook, NY 2019 “Constellations,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY 2018 “The American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY “Make/Work” (curated by Jenene Nagy), Los

Angeles Valley College, Los Angeles, CA “Vision Valley” (curated by Adam Miller), Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale, CA 2017 “Synchronicity: A State of Painting,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY 2016 “Memory Theater” (curated by Srijon Chowdhury), Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR 2015 “A Few Days,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY “Salon du Dessin,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY 2014 “Death Ship: Tribute to H.C. Westerman” (curated

by Adam Miller and Devon Oder), The Pit, Glendale, CA “Floor Flowers” (curated by David Pagel), Claremont Graduate University Gallery, Claremont, CA “A Poem to Raoul and Agnes” (curated by Sherman Sam), Ancient & Modern, London, United Kingdom “Left Coast: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA 2013 “California Visual Music” (curated by Marcus Herse), Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Los Angeles, CA “Local Fish: Perspectives Piscatoreal,” Ernie Wolfe Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Roy Dowell and Alexander Kroll,” Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL

2012 “Split Realities,” Nan Rae Gallery, Woodbury University, Los Angeles, CA “Made in LA 2012: Los Angeles Biennial,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA “Arctic Summer,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Viva La Raspberries” (curated by Evan Holloway), Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York, NY “The Early Show,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY “Vous Play,” JB JURVE, Los Angeles, CA “Drawn,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2011 “painting, design, speculation, generosity” (curated by Alexander Kroll), CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2010 “The Jewel Thief,” Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY “New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions, 2000–2010,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “Works in Edition,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Ends and Means,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY “The Artist’s Museum,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 2009 “Paintings and Drawings by Lari Pittman, Collages

by Roy Dowell,” Kunsthaus Santa Fé Gallery, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico “Pictures of Words” (curated by David Pagel), Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany

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“Reading Standing Up,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2008 “ARAC@AAM: Anderson Ranch at the Aspen Art Museum,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO “20 Years Ago Today: Supporting Individual Artists in L.A.,” Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA “Looky-See,” Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “Summer,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Las Vegas Collects Contemporary,” Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV 2007 “Paper,” Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY 66

2006 “Couples Discourse,” Palmer Museum of Art, State College, PA 2003 “Raid the Icebox,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “A Most Engaging Clutch,” The Floating Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Piacenza – Los Angeles, Libri d’arte e poesia (1991-2008) dall’archivio di Michele Lombardelli,” XNL Piacenza, Piacenza, Italy “Ecstatic,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2002 “LA Post-Cool” (curated by Michael Duncan), San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; traveled to Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “Roy Dowell, Daniel Mendel-Black, Alexis Smith,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2001 “Cal’s Art, Sampling California Painting,” University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, TX “Seeing or Believing,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “The Importance of Being Earnest” (curated by Michael Duncan), Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 2000 “Drawings 2000,” Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY “The Big Go Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop” (curated by Michael Duncan), Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT; Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV; and The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX; and Beaver College Art Gallery, Glenside, PA 1999 “Group Exhibition,” Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY 1998 “90069,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1997 “Woven in Oaxaca: Rugs from Mexico,” A/D, New York, NY “Smoggy Abstractions,” Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI 1996 “25 Years: An Exhibition of Selected Works,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Between Reality and Abstraction: California Art at the End of the Century,” The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX 1995 “Pasted Paper: Collage in the 20th Century,” Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles, CA 1994 “Balls, World Cup USA 1994,” Newspace, Los Angeles, CA “Twentieth–Century Drawings,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA “In Plain Sight: Abstract Painting in Los Angeles” (curated by Frances Colpitt), Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio, TX; traveled to University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX “Paintings of the 80’s,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Fractured Identity: Cut and Paste” (curated

by Lindsay Walt and Tina Potter), Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY “pen & ink” (curated by Michael Darling), Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA “Very Visual Dialogue: Personal Journeys in Abstract Painting” (curated by Tom Krumpak), Rancho Santiago College Gallery, Santa Ana, CA 1993 “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” The Drawing Center, New York, NY; traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO; and the American Center, Paris, France “Object Bodies” (curated by Terry R. Myers),

Emison Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN; traveled to Turman Gallery, Terre Haute, IN “School Days,” Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Collage,” Brian Gross Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA “Aspects of Painting in Los Angeles,” College of Creative Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 1992 “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition 1992, Coming Unraveled” (curated by Anne Ayres), Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “California North and South,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO “Roy Dowell, Paul McCarthy, Renée Petropoulos,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1991 “Quick Coagulation Forms the August Corpse,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “20th Century Collage,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice, France 1990 “TIME: A Portfolio of Etchings,” Marc Richards Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “The Ends of Painting/The Edges of Abstraction” (curated by David Pagel), Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Phoenix Triennial” (curated by Bruce Kurtz), Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ “Past & Present,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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“Eastern Aesthetic” (curated by Nancy Riegelman), Allport Associates Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1989 “I to Eye,” Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Cultural Fetish” (curated by Lawrence Gipe), Pasadena City College Art Gallery, Pasadena, CA 1988 “New Works on Paper,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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1987 “Works on Paper,” Pence Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “First LACE Annual” (curated by Ned Rifkin), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA 1984 “Eccentric Images,” Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Roy Dowell, DeLoss McGraw, Frank Romero,” Koplin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “The Cotton Exchange Exhibition,” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA “Olympiad,” Koplin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1983 “Variations 2: 7 Los Angeles Painters” (curated by Constance Mallinson), Security Pacific Plaza, Los Angeles, CA “5 Painters,” Roy Boyd Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1981 “Paintings: Dowell, Harwood, Mitchell, Rabbin,” Los Angeles Valley College, Los Angeles, CA

1980 “In a Major and a Minor Scale” (curated by Wayne Kuwada and Candice Lee), Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Oriental Mystique,” California State University, Los Angeles, CA 1977 “100 Directions in Southern California Art,” Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA 1976 Ellie Blankfort Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Dowell/Lumbert/Pittman/Sherman,” Long Beach City College Art Gallery, Long Beach, CA GRANTS, COMMISSIONS & FELLOWSHIPS 2012 LAX-ART Billboard Project, La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA California Community Foundation Artists’ Resource for Completion Grant, Los Angeles, CA 2006 “Constructed Histories,” Los Angeles Metro Orange Line, Canoga Park, CA 1998 “Ajax,” commissioned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art for Windows on Wilshire, Los Angeles, CA 1996 J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts Fellowship, Los Angeles, CA

1995 Art Matters Inc. Fellowship, New York, NY

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

1991 Djerassi Artist Residency Fellowship, Woodside, CA

San José Museum of Art, San José, CA

1989 “Nature Culture,” commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

SELECT COLLECTIONS Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico Fredrick Weisman Art Foundation Collection, Los Angeles, CA Grunwald Collection, Los Angeles, CA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ROY DOWELL 8 February – 23 March 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2023 David Pagel Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue layout by Spevack Loeb, New York, NY ISBN: 979-8-3507-2555-1 Cover: untitled #1224, (detail), 2022

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