The Gift of Art - Steven Gonzalez

The Gift of Art

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The Gift of Art Steven Gonzalez

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Emily Mason, Aired Out, 2011 oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in $47000

BEN ARONSON is recognized as one of America’s

most respected painters of the contemporary urban landscape. With paintings included in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums, Aronson’s paintings of the material sensations of the city activate both memory and the imagination. The most recent exhibition of new work by the artist, entitled Views from Above, featured paintings that reorient the viewer to a higher, more contemplative vantage point: the rooftops. In these paintings, the viewer is situated high off the ground, the visceral tumult of city life receding from view and its clamor reduced to a low hum.

Ben Aronson, Sunset, Chicago River, 2014 oil on panel, 13.38 x 18 in $12500

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FORREST MOSES's paintings of serene woodlands and

placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of their understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.

Forrest Moses, Mountain Water, 2008, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 in $75000

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Woody Gwyn is widely regarded as one of the foremost realist

painters of the American landscape. His work is distinguished by the passion he brings to it in pursuing what he calls “the truth of the land.”

Gwyn’s work usually begins, in his words, “out in the field” with en plein air sketches and watercolors as direct and immediate record of his observations and impressions on site. He paints exactingly from close study of his subject with an almost devotional attitude toward detail: oceans with thousands of finely painted waves, trees with countless leaves and blossoms, wide expanses of grass or brush with innumerable blades and branches.

For Gwyn, the “truth of the land” would seem to reside in the most unlikely and humblest of subjects – a rusty guardrail, a wasp’s nest, leaves floating on a pond, or a rocky mesa. In the smallest of detail of his most quotidian subjects, Gwyn uses his unique sense of intuition combined with unconventional perspective, clarity of light, and meticulous technique to provide us with a roadmap to seeing the magnificence of things that hide in plain sight.

Woody Gwyn Southwest Highway, ca. 1980s oil on canvas, 72 x 76 in $155000

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Bill Barrett, New York State of Mind, 2005 fabricated bronze, 60 x 54 x 30 in $95000

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Bill Barrett explores the interplay between positive and negative

space with grace, elegance, and incomparable technical mastery. Barrett’s sophisticated constructions in fabricated aluminum, bronze, and steel strike an exquisite balance between volume and space, light and shadow, organic intuition and tectonic invention. His manipulation of the formal relationships between these forces amass a fluid choreography of polyrhythmic counterbalances and reveals the masterful skill and unequaled vision of one of the foremost sculptors of our time.

The energy of gesture infuses his graceful, dance-like forms with an elegant spontaneity reminiscent of action painting and the improvisational spirit of Abstract Expressionism. For this reason Barrett’s work manifest a striking quality of kinesis that manages to seem graceful and organic despite the solidity of the metal medium. For Barrett, artwork is “a vehicle through which my humanity communicates with the viewer’s. There is beauty in humanity—and art that reflects this beauty can elevate the quality of life.”

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LINDA STOJAK is regarded for her highly nuanced and evocative portrayal of the

human figure, sensitizing viewers to the indelible aura of the feminine spirit. Stojak’s spectral paintings may be seen as inquiries into materiality and presence, both physical and symbolic.

Though her paintings have been described as “psychological self-portraits,� they remain in possession of a resonance that is broadly universal, a quality evoked through minimal, anonymous figuration and elemental atmospheres that are neither conditional nor specific.

In their expressive, painterly openness and aching emotional charge, they offer empathy and fellowship.

Though Stojak makes her work without espousing explicit ideological polemic, the figures in her paintings invite serious contemplation of their possible conceptual significance.

They possess a sense of resolute and enduring presence even as their initial appearance is enigmatic. These figures can stand as powerful, if subtle, symbols of permanence immune from erasure. Inevitably, they also reflect the synthesis of emotions, fears, conflicts, doubts, and experiences that comprise the human condition.

Linda Stojak, Untitled (Figure 102), 2018 oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in $44000

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Skip Steinworth, Shallots, 2017, graphite on board, 7.75 x 9 in $5200

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Peter Burega infuses his sumptuous paintings with a personal

vision of nature as a place of light and color. Redefining the relationship between nature and art, it is as though Burega liberates nature from the constraints of time, history and specificity to allow it to emerge, fully reimagined and expressed on canvas, as unbound consciousness of the pure beauty of nature. Burega’s paintings express the spirit of nature rather than its anatomy. He dissolves specificity of image into essence of color, line, and light that he choreographs into his paintings to create pure sensation.

Peter Burega, In the Morning Light no. IV, 2018 oil on panel, 60 x 60 in $16500 11

JIVAN LEE’s extraordinary paintings are visual celebrations of the land

and its ineffable mysteries. By design, Lee’s practice requires him to paint the land as it changes before him: the sunrise as it begins to illuminate the earth in the morning, or an afternoon storm as it gathers strength and then unloads or dissipates. Even beyond these momentary shifts, Lee’s art also references the way the land exists as an accumulation of these subtle changes that take place over thousands of years: the way a river carves a valley, or in the gradual formation of forests and mountain ranges.

Jivan Lee, Springtime Along the MIddle Way, 2019, oil on linen, 48 x 52 in $15000 12

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DAN CHRISTENSEN is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. The great critic Clement Greenberg anointed him in 1990 as “one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.” Greenberg viewed Christensen as an exemplar of “post-painterly abstraction”—a term he coined for the movement that followed Abstract Expressionism in modernist progress towards what Greenberg regarded as a “pure art” that would eschew subject matter, spatial illusion and an artist’s persona in favor of revealing the “truthfulness” of the canvas.

Never departing from his resolute dedication to the medium of paint, Christensen was at the center of many of the most important developments, innovations and currents in American abstract painting after the mid-20th century. Starting in the ’60s, he used spray guns to draw colorful acrylic stacks, loops and lines on canvas. These “ribbon” and “loop” paintings were among the most original abstract paintings of the decade and brought him immediate critical acclaim. Exploring other directions in the 70s, he returned to the spray process in the 80s, both over and under a layer of thick paint he scored with expressive marks. Late in the decade he began a new series of “loop” paintings, eventually settling on a centered, circular motif as seen in Byzantine.

Christensen’s paintings are in such prestigious institutions as the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Albright-Knox Gallery; the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution; the Butler Institute of American Art; the Chicago Art Institute; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, among many others.

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) Byzantine, ca. 1988 acrylic on canvas, 68.63 x 37.63 in $90000

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David Ligare, Landscape with a Horse, 2019 oil on canvas, 60 x 80 in $65000

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For more than fifty years, David Ligare has executed paintings that seem like reincarnations of the very spirit of classicism. These exquisitely detailed representational paintings incorporate an evocative visual language inspired by Greco/Roman mythology, art and culture. In their composition, they echo the graceful elegance of classical ideals of balance, unity from oppositional forces, restraint and geometric proportion. Often their allegorical subjects allude to Greek and Roman myths, which Ligare views as timelessly relevant to excellence in contemporary life Looking at a David Ligare painting, one is likely to feel a sense of the hallowed. In his images—labored over by the artist for months, if not years—there are discernible resonances of the profound, as though the artist has distilled the very essences of enduring lessons and ideas from classical times. In so doing, Ligare creates a sense of beauty in a manner freed from the clutter of contemporary life. Ligare’s artistry is informed by a deep learning and appreciation of classicism; its ageless ideals, parables, stories and achievements that inform our collective imagination and carry the truths and wisdom on which our civilization is formed.

David Ligare was born in Oak Park, IL and studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. His paintings are included in numerous permanent collections of prominent institutions, including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. In June 2015, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA presented the retrospective: David Ligare: California Classicist, which was accompanied by a major monograph on the artist.

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Wishing you happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous new year

Steven Gonzalez 18

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 Prices as listed are current as of December 1, 2019 and subject to change. Š 2019 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š LewAllen Galleries