Ronnie Landfield - 50th Anniversary Exhibition

L ANDF IELD 50 TH

Anniversary exhibition

F I N D L AY G A L L E R I E S

REASON AND MEMORY | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 92 X 76 1/2 IN | FG©139467 3 | F I N D L AY

R O N N I E

L A N D F I E L D

I M AGI N AT IO N ’ S

R E A L I TI E S

BY: CARTER RATCLIFF | SEPTEMBER 2019 Sheer color delights us. Felt first in childhood, this chromatic pleasure returns with a familiar, unreserved intensity when we encounter the paintings of Ronnie Landfield. The luminous orange on the left-hand side of Reason and Memory, 2019; the painting’s two shades of green; and its varieties of blue, some dense, others bright and fathomless—for a long moment, it seems enough simply to luxuriate in these colors, as one stops on a warm day to feel the heat of the sun. But Reason and Memory offers more than color in its primal innocence. There are traces of long experience—with paint and in life—in the darker tones that drift like mist through the painting’s reds and ochers, solidifying them in varying degrees and inflecting the large area of snowy white with a suggestion of reflective thought. In their way, these monumental subtleties are as joyous as Landfield’s passages of unalloyed color, for they engage us just as fully, drawing us into boundless fields of memory and speculation.

Many of the paintings in this exhibition are big in their measurable dimensions and all of them open vast spaces for the imagination. While it is tempting to assign the colors along the lower edge of a canvas to the foreground and those along the upper to the background, with the middle ground marked by the colors in between, a reading of this kind limits our understanding of the universe Landfield invokes with his art. Though he admires Chinese landscape painting, especially that of the Sung Dynasty, he is not a landscape painter. He may well find starting points in landscape— the look and the idea of it—yet that genre has never encompassed his art. For his areas of color have never been depictions. When a slowly undulating band of gray brings a distant mountain range to mind it stands at a remove from that reading, in part because it seems untouched by gravity. Landfield’s forms levitate. Unregulated by ordinary physics, his panoramas usher us into to a realm of spirit—intangible but not other-worldly. His art addresses our downto-earth humanity.

LANDFIELD | 4

In Landfield’s first mature paintings, black bands enclose fields of unmodulated pale turquoise. Made in 1966-67, they were Minimalist in appearance but not, as it turned out, in essence. A survey of his career prompts the thought that the empty surfaces of those early paintings were the fertile voids that gave birth to the richness of his later work.

By 1968, he was laying canvases on the floor and staining them with washes of lush color. Often the pigment spreads in unexpected ways, an effect the artist calls “organic.” At this stage, chance works in tandem with intention; then the latter takes the upper hand as Landfield brushes on wide swathes of color, stacked in horizontal patterns or curved and tilted, each responding to the ones around it. The result is imagery that symbolizes the complexity of our beings: embodied, we are functions of our organic, biological makeup, and yet we are conscious, capable of deliberate purpose. Blending the organic and the intentional, Landfield captures our doubleness.

And a third element appears in many of his paintings: narrow bands of color aligned with the edges of the canvas. Descended from the ones that surrounded the pale turquoise fields of 1966-67, their function is, first, to LANDFIELD WITH SERIES PAINTINGS acknowledge the physical limits of a painting’s surface and, next, to serve #4 GREAT JONES STREET, NYC 1966 | PHOTO BY: TOM GORMLEY as portals to the unlimited realm of the painting’s colors. For Landfield is an heir of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and those Abstract Expressionist painters whose allover images opened onto the infinite. His high-keyed palette gives him an affinity with a slightly younger generation, the color-field painters whose ranks included Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Releasing him from the narrow ideal of formalist purity that preoccupied the color-fielders, Landfield’s mix of pictorial elements—his pouring, his brushing, his ruler-strait colorbands—propelled him to the forefront of a still younger group of artists who became known in the early 1970s as Lyrical Abstractionists.

5 | F I N D L AY

Others gathered under that label include Dan Christensen, Ron Davis, Bill Pettet, Ken Showell, and Peter Young, all of whom found their way to styles that assert highly developed individual sensibilities while intimating ultimate things. In other sectors of the New York art world, their contemporaries were elaborating possibilities lurking in the Minimalist literalism that produced, in the mid-1960s, gray cubes and grids of unfinished metal. Giving concept precedence over imagination, these post-Minimalists invented process art, the anti-theatrical genre known as performance art, and, at this tendency’s furthest extreme, conceptual art. On some gallery walls, typewritten texts took the place of paintings. It seemed, for a time, that art might disappear into art criticism. That this didn’t happen is owed in part to the Lyrical Abstractionists, who had the courage of their conviction that painting is inexhaustible.

Landfield was then and still is exemplary in acting on his belief that a painting is an occasion for an encounter between two individuals, artist and viewer, and thus is an opportunity for empathy. To make sense of a painting like Reason and Memory, to feel one’s way into its visual and emotional logic, is, in a roundabout manner, to make sense of oneself. As self-awareness intensifies, the self sees beyond its own boundaries. As perceptions merge with the perceived, the fluidity of his materials carries over to our experience of his imagery; and that is why the horizon he sends across a canvas sometimes vanishes into a play of colors evoking a world that is all sky or all undulating earth. Because there is no end to tracing the fluctuations of texture and density that flow through Landfield’s light-filled pigments, we come alive to ourselves as interpreters— as generators of meaning. In responding to his art, we sense the affinities between ourselves and our world, a place that is at once gloriously welcoming and increasingly jeopardized. We understand, further, that it is among his larger accomplishments to have made these affinities, these products of the imagination, compellingly real.

LANDFIELD IN STUDIO | 2019 LANDFIELD | 6

7 | F I N D L AY

JOURNEY IN BLUE | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 43 X 76 1/2 IN | FG©139469

LANDFIELD | 8

ANGEL IN THE WIND | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 47 X 41 IN | FG©139468 9 | F I N D L AY

BREAK OF DAWN | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 92 X 74 1/2 IN | FG©139494 LANDFIELD | 10

“Hopefully my paintings convey a felt perception of life, an awareness of the history of art, and a clear expression of my passion and sense of spirituality. I sense a visual music that externalizes what I feel within me and in the air.�

-Ronnie Landfield

1 1 | F I N D L AY

TRAIL OF LIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 33 X 40 IN | FG©139470 LANDFIELD | 12

LONE COMPANION ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 50 X 16 IN FG©139480 1 3 | F I N D L AY

SOLITARY JOURNEY ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 43 X 21 IN FG©139482 LANDFIELD | 14

“My work is intuitive, color is the language I use to express my feelings. Nature inspires the imagery in my paintings and they are expressions of spirit, informed and guided by God.�

-Ronnie Landfield

1 5 | F I N D L AY

TABLE OF LIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 34 X 55 IN | FG©139478

LANDFIELD | 16

ALONG THE WAY | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 21 1/2 X 79 IN | FG©139483

1 7 | F I N D L AY

RADICAL LIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS| 24 1/2 X 65 IN | FG©139484

LANDFIELD | 18

1 9 | F I N D L AY

BLUES AND THE RIVER | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 41 X 92 IN | FG©139490

LANDFIELD | 20

PALETTE OF DREAMS | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 90 X 72 IN | FG©139487 2 1 | F I N D L AY

ANGEL OF FREEDOM | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 55 X 40 IN | FG©139475 LANDFIELD | 22

2 3 | F I N D L AY

VISION OF TOMORROW | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 37 1/2 X 75 IN | FG©139481

LANDFIELD | 24

2 5 | F I N D L AY

ALL AND EVERYTHING | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 92 X 62 IN | FG©139485

BROAD DAYLIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 67 X 65 IN | FG©139493

LANDFIELD | 26

2 7 | F I N D L AY

EDGE OF THE RIVER | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 44 X 94 IN | FG©139492

LANDFIELD | 28

ROAD TO REASON | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 43 X 76 IN | FG©139489

2 9 | F I N D L AY

BALLADS AND BLUES | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS| 45 X 76 1/2 IN | FG©139488

LANDFIELD | 30

“I paint abstract landscapes to express my feelings that nature, which symbolizes truth, beauty and freedom to me, is endangered by indifference, overdevelopment and ecological disaster.�

-Ronnie Landfield

3 1 | F I N D L AY

RIVER OF BLUES | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 43 X 55 IN | FG©139472 LANDFIELD | 32

RISING LIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 29 1/2 X 25 IN | FG©139477 3 3 | F I N D L AY

REQUIEM | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 77 X 55 IN | FG©139486 LANDFIELD | 34

COMING HOME | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 46 X 51 IN | FG©139471 3 5 | F I N D L AY

BLUES ACROSS THE RIVER | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 43 X 50 IN | FG©139473 LANDFIELD | 36

SHINE YOUR LIGHT | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 93 X 95 IN | FG©139474

3 7 | F I N D L AY

RADIANT JOURNEY | ACRYLIC ON CANVAS | 36 X 44 IN | FG©139491

LANDFIELD | 38

SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX Bavarian National Museum, Munich, Germany (Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen) Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC High Museum, Atlanta, GA Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y Hunter College, New York, NY Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St Louis, MO Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

3 9 | F I N D L AY

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, International University Art Museum, Miami, FL Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Ringling, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Sheldon Memorial Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE Smith College Museum of Art, Northhampton, MA Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, CA Udine Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Udine, Italy University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI UNM Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2013 2012 2011 2009 2007 2006 2005 2004 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1996 1994 1991 1990 1989 1988

Findlay Galleries, Recent Paintings, Palm Beach, FL Findlay Galleries, Dual Exhibition, NYC and Palm Beach Findlay Galleries, Recent Paintings, New York, NYC Findlay Galleries, Recent Paintings, Palm Beach, FL Ronnie Landfield Five Decades, Stux + Haller Gallery, NYC Coming Full Circle, Chashama Foundation, NYC After The Rain, Recent Paintings, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Ronnie Landfield Recent Paintings, VLA Summer Benefit 2013, NYC Where It All Began, Recent Paintings, Kenny Gallery, H.S. Art & Design, NYC Ronnie Landfield, New Paintings, Stephen Haller Gallery, NYC Beyond Colorfield, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico 40th Anniversary Exhibition, Stephen Haller Gallery, NYC Forty Years of Color Abstraction, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Painting from Five Decades, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Toward Monochrome, Heidi Cho Gallery, NYC 3 Paintings, 750 Seventh Avenue and 49th Street, New York City Public Installation Color Coded, Heidi Cho Gallery, NYC 6 Paintings, 450 Lexington Avenue, NYC (Six-Month Public Installation) Karen Lynne Gallery, Boca Raton, FL 3 Paintings Tower 49, NYC (Twelve-Month Public Installation) Waddington and Tribby Galleries, Boca Raton, FL Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, NYC Claudia Carr Gallery, NYC Jaquelin Loyd Gallery, Ranchos des Taos, NM Jaffe Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, FL Continental Gallery, Sapporo, Japan Nicholas/Alexander Gallery, NYC Stephen Rosenberg Gallery, NYC Jaffe Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, FL Robert Kidd Gallery, Birmingham, MI Richard Nadeau Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Stephen Haller Fine Art, NYC Stephen Haller Fine Art, NYC Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA Stephen Haller Fine Art, NYC Hokin/Kaufman Gallery, Chicago, IL

1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981

1980 1979 1978 1976 1975 1974 1973 1971 1970 1969

Grace Hokin Gallery, Miami, FL Brunnier Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA (10-Year Retrospective) Stephen Haller Fine Art, NYC Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA B.R. Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, D.C. Grace Hokin Gallery, Miami, FL Hokin/Kaufman Gallery, Chicago, IL Louis Meisel Gallery, NYC Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, D. C. Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC Medici - Berensen Gallery, Miami, FL Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, D.C. Nexus Gallery, Atlanta, GA Medici-Berensen Gallery, Miami, FL Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA Bank of America, World Headquarters, San Francisco, CA (Public Installation) Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC B.R. Kornblatt Gallery, Washington D.C. Sarah Rentschler Gallery, NYC Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA Medici-Berensen Gallery, Miami, FL Sarah Rentschler Gallery, NYC B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, Baltimore, MD Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, WA B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, Baltimore, MD Corcoran and Greenberg Gallery, Coral Gables, FL André Emmerich Gallery, NYC André Emmerich Gallery, NYC Corcoran and Greenberg Gallery, Coral Gables, FL Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston, TX André Emmerich Gallery, NYC Corcoran and Corcoran Gallery, Coral Gables, FL David Whitney Gallery, New York City, NY Corcoran and Corcoran Gallery, Coral Gables, FL Joseph Helman Gallery, St. Louis, MO New Gallery, Cleveland, OH Jack Glenn Gallery, Corona Del Mar, CA David Whitney Gallery, NYC

LANDFIELD | 40

724

F I N D L AY G A L L E R I E S

fifth avenue ,

165

7 th

floor , new york , new york 10019 · (212) 421 5390

worth avenue , palm beach , florida 33480 ∙ (561) 655 2090 www . findlaygalleries . com

Copyright © 2019, Wally Findlay Galleries International Inc.. All rights reserved.