Logan Maxwell Hagege-Western Art & Architecture Magazine

FEBRUARY | MARCH 2014

From Cowboy to Contemporary

Architecture in the West: From Santa Fe Stunning to Montana Modern A Class of His Own: Logan Maxwell Hagege Connectivity: The Celebration of Fine Art Kent Ullberg: The Monumentalist

plus:

Wanderings: San Antonio, Texas Frozen in Motion: The Progress of a Sculpture In the Studio with Peter Holbrook

With subjects that echo the Taos Society, movement that evokes Georgia O’Keeffe and a Minimalist talent that recalls the great Modernists, Logan Maxwell Hagege is creating work that is utterly Western yet entirely unique WRITTEN BY LAURA ZUCKERMAN

nder the watchful eye and unerring hand of artist Logan Maxwell Hagege, the deserts of the American Southwest come marching to life in a parade of angular images that capture the spare beauty of an arid landscape and of an ancient and enduring Native American culture shaped by the extremes of its environment.

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A CLASS of

HIS OWN

There can be no missteps in the unyielding desert, a stern taskmaster that tenders no forgiveness for the unschooled sojourner who neglects to carry such necessities as water and who strays too far from shelter in the unrelenting sun.

It is as much a place of imagination as harsh reality, a land where massive mesas can be dwarfed by towering clouds and where dreams can be as broad as the horizon.

For Hagege, vast deserts are the source of his inspiration — but not the limit of his imagination.

The 33-year-old California artist has emblazoned his

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The Sun and The Clouds Oil | 40 x 40 inches

website with the legend, “Protesting against the rising tide

Floating Skull at Vermillion Cliffs Oil | 30 x 40 inches

of conformity,” but his paintings will persuade you if the words do not.

Society of Artists in New Mexico, Hagege’s desert figures

Hagege has marshaled all the artistic forces that stem

are mostly Native Americans, sometimes wrapped in blan-

from his years of formal study to create works informed by

kets, often depicted in profile where facial planes mimic the

Modernism in design and color but not mastered by it, and to

hard-edged beauty of flat lands uplifted by rock features but

achieve a style that is produced by a vision so individual that

overtly ornamented by sky.

it comes as a fresh surprise to learn of its universal appeal.

Hagege is an explorer uncovering worlds inhabited by

Art experts and collectors of Hagege’s works are not so

wanderers like himself. A face and figure from the San Felipe

much admiring of his paintings of the peoples and land-

Pueblo outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, appears and

scapes of the American Southwest as they are mesmerized

reappears, his craggy features softened against the backdrop

by them.

of outsize, geometric clouds in Full Sky, an oil-on-linen com-

“Logan has an entirely unique style. You can’t call it

position, and in the oil The Sun and the Clouds.

Realism; you can’t call it Abstract. He is sometimes catego-

“A lot of the people I paint are constantly wandering,

rized as a Western artist and sometimes categorized as a

they are walking in a certain direction, they appear to be

contemporary artist. In truth, he’s in a class of his own,”

going somewhere, but it’s unclear where,” says Hagege.

says Beau Alexander, who, as owner of Maxwell Alexander Gallery near Los Angeles, represents Hagege.

Echoing the subjects of the early 20th-century Taos

They are the artist in other guises: nonconformists, searchers whose objects are indefinable, seekers of such things as are found in the desert, where openness acts as

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The Rain Falls Oil | 80 x 52 inches

There is little that is static in a Hagege work, with movement the natural rhythm of a restless brilliance that finds its voice in Floating Skull at Vermillion Cliffs, a painting that evokes works with animal skulls by Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

Peter Riess, director of Western art at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, says Hagege’s work references O’Keeffe and Taos artists such as Gerard Curtis Delano, but Hagege has his own vernacular, causing his shows at the gallery to all but sell out.

Like Taos artists who found a nation within a nation in northern New Mexico, Hagege depicts a region that is in America but not of its mainstream culture.

Referring to the early local art colony and its members, Jina Brenneman, curator of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, says, “In many respects and, for their time, they were outlaws.”

For Hagege, rules bend at the insistence of imagination rather than will.

Realism is juxtaposed with Abstraction because classical training paired with creativity permits it to be so. a kind of cover.

It is a land of statements about resilience, of desert

Western Gothic takes that role center stage. A deer skull

creatures such as lizards and of human community, which

crowned by a rack of antlers looms, outsize, over a tiny

can fend so well with so little. What is hidden is revealed by

Hopi Katsina doll in a painting whose power is not muted

Hagege, a maestro who uses contrast to sharpen color and

by the sparseness of the design. Before the image appeared

mood to subdue it.

on canvas, it took form in Hagege’s mind and it spoke to

That technique reaches a crescendo in Monument Valley Summer, a landscape in which vertical rock formations worn by wind and abrasion form a symphony of rust reds and coral pinks intensified by an overarching white cloud and muddy gray sky.

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“There’s a role for bucking the trend,” he says.

what he describes as a process of distilling the complex within the simple.

“It’s not easy to bring things down to their fewest elements and still make a painting work,” he says.

Hagege strikes no inauthentic notes in his paintings. A

A CLASS of

HIS OWN lesser artist might succumb to temptation and splash color

Scottsdale, Arizona, was entranced by a Hagege painting and

on the unadorned white blankets that cloak two of the three

sought to purchase it. The piece was acquired by another

American Indians in The Rising Clouds, a triangular composi-

buyer, but Leshe won the prize: to represent the artist at

tion whose edges are blunted by a background of rounded

her galleries. Hagege is to be at the center of a show at the

clouds. The painting is yet another indication that Hagege

Wyoming gallery in September, at the height of the Jackson

has mastered that fine point of fine art: knowing what to

Hole Fall Arts Festival.

leave out.

“What attracts me to his work, his strong palette and

It is a talent shown in relief by such established 20thcentury American artists as Maynard Dixon, whose later Modernism still was paired — to advantage — with Western themes.

modern designs, is that it is different from the work of other artists; it’s refreshing,” she says.

Hagege is unwilling to rest on laurels he has gained as an artist who is still relatively young. Like the landscapes he

It is a heady time for Hagege, whose work will be showcased in February and March along with the works of other acclaimed artists at the Masters of the American West, the

prefers, he has no wish to be boxed in.

“I’m going to keep changing as I go on, one painting leads to the next and that one to another,” he says.

signature annual event at the Autry National Center in Los Laura Zuckerman lives and writes in Salmon, Idaho.

Angeles.

It was at a past Masters that Maryvonne Leshe, managing partner of Trailside Galleries in Jackson, Wyoming, and

Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and in Country Magazine.

Above the Mountains Oil | 40 x 60 inches

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