Steven Gonzalez | The Gift of Art 2023

THE GIFT OF ART 2023

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 sgonzalez@lewallengalleries.com | lewallengalleries.com cover: Forrest Moses, October Reflections with Woods, 2001, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches

THE GIFT OF ART 2023

Curated by Steven Gonzalez Director of Sales

Jivan Lee Up close Jivan Lee's paintings celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable. When viewed at a distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, and landscape – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image.

Lee’s oil paintings explore the raw material of paint to create images and engender emotional response.

He has become a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting, known for his lively sense of color, his textural application of paint, and his reflective, cerebral approach to engaging with his subject. His art engages his viewers in a visceral involvement with the landscape, which he achieves through a highly physical plein-air painting process.

He is inspired by the landscape and artists of the Southwest. Whether conveying the shifting hues of backlit clouds, or a New Mexico river valley set ablaze in sunlight, Lee communicates a visceral, momentary feeling of being in a place and surrounded by natural beauty. He does this in part by emphasizing the sheer physical nature of his work.

Rather than blending brushstrokes together, Lee allows his gestural marks to remain as sculptural as possible, highlighting them as unexpected, spontaneous sources of pattern or rhythm. The surface of a Jivan Lee painting thus becomes a mosaic of color cells or an energetic terrain all its own, brimming with fluid activity reminiscent at times of action painting.

Lee is originally from Woodstock, NY, and studied painting and environmental policy at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. Following graduate school, he taught for the University of New Mexico in Taos, and founded and directed the Project for Art and the Environment. His paintings have been exhibited nationally at museums and educational institutions and covered in numerous publications.

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Jivan Lee The House in the Sage - Winter Storm (diptych), 2022 Oil on panel, 36 x 72.25 inches 5

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Jivan Lee West from 150 at Noon (diptych), 2023 Oil on panel, 48 x 96 inches 7

Elias Rivera (1937-2019)

Eloquently distilling the essence of daily life in these Indigenous communities, Elias Rivera’s striking canvases are brimming with figures bathed in radiant light and color. With a successful career spanning more than half a century, Rivera was a renowned Santa Fe-based painter. In his vibrant works inspired by Dutch, Spanish, and Italian Old Master paintings, Rivera chronicles vivid scenes of life in New Mexico, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Capturing moments in time, almost cinematically, Rivera portrays bustling markets and the unique customs of these diverse peoples in his exquisite, original compositions.

Born in Bronx, NY, Elias Rivera attended the School of Industrial Arts from 1953 to 1954, and then the Art Students League from 1955 to 1961, where he studied with and was mentored by artist Frank Mason. Rivera moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1982, where he met his future wife, artist Susan Contreras, and lived and worked throughout the rest of his life. He received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2004. A major monograph entitled "Elias Rivera" was published in 2006 with an essay by well-known art critic and writer Edward Lucie- Smith. Following a tragic car accident in 2011, Rivera stopped working in 2015 and passed away in 2019 in Santa Fe.

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Elias Rivera Chi Chi Castenango, 1993 Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches 11

Elias Rivera Flowers of the Mind #5, 2002 Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches

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Elias Rivera Untitled, 2008 Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches

Fritz Scholder (1937-2005)

Fritz Scholder is famed for his ground-breaking reinvention of the way Native Americans are portrayed in fine art that began in the 1960s and departed radically from traditional, stereotypical depictions of the mythic Indian. Scholder came to prominence while teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the mid-1960s where he became committed to a new, controversial, conceptualization of contemporary Native American art.

He recoiled against traditional representations of Indians as “noble savages” or “brute warriors” and resolved to humanize the imagery and “paint the Indian real, not red.” These early paintings highlighted the dramatic divergence between the reality of the Native American’s actual place in contemporary American society and the more idealized, romantic, false image that had been presented in painting of the subject before him.

Scholder found his own foundational and signature style that allowed him to explore later interests in more gestural and abstracted approaches to expressing the figural form and engage with broader mysteries and enigmas of the human experience, imagination and psyche. He became fascinated with themes such as dream-like and mythic characters with powerful erotic or occult energy and referencing connections to ancient as well as more modern cultures, the natural world as well as realms of the magical and momento mori.

Fritz Scholder received a B.A. from Sacramento State College in 1960 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1964. Over a dozen books have been published on Scholder and his work, and he has been profiled in two documentaries for public television. In a single year, exhibitions of his work were seen in Japan, France, China, Germany, and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2008, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian mounted an unprecedented dual-city career retrospective entitled "Indian/Not Indian" in both New York City and Washington, D.C. The Denver Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art presented a major exhibition in 2015-2016 of Scholder’s Indian Series works entitled "Super Indian." His awards include fellowships from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Whitney foundations.

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Fritz Scholder Shaman as a Stag, n.d.

Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches

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Fritz Scholder American Portrait #3, 1980 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

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Fritz Scholder Aspen #5, 1984 Oil on canvas, 80 x 68 inches

Fritz Scholder Entrance A (Entrance to the Kiva), 1995 Monotype, 36 x 27.25 inches

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Fritz Scholder Heaven, 1996 Oil on canvas, 80 x 68 inches

Bill Barrett Over the course of his distinguished seven-decade artistic career, Bill Barrett has become legendary for exploring in his elegant and lyrical sculpture the interplay between positive and negative space in bronze and other metals, material one thinks of as static and inflexible.

Additionally, Barrett is widely acclaimed for a singular level of technical mastery. His graceful sculptures coherently transform visual symmetry with improvisational sequences of gestural spontaneity and freeflowing movement. Paradoxically, for art rendered in the solidity of metal, Barrett’s work nevertheless calls to mind the fluidity of calligraphic strokes frozen in space and portray a dream-like sense of floating forms and emanating energy.

His alluring constructions strike an exquisite balance between volume and space, light and shadow, organic intuition and tectonic invention. Barrett’s command of the formal relationships between these forces evokes a fluid choreography and reveals the consummate skill and unequaled vision of one of the foremost sculptors of our time.

The energy of modernist gesture infuses his graceful, dance-like metal forms with an ironic spontaneity reminiscent of action painting and the improvisational spirit of Abstract Expressionism. For this reason, Barrett’s work manifests a striking quality of kinesis that manages to seem elegant and organic, despite the solidity of the metal medium. Art historian and critic Peter Frank has written about Barrett’s work noting that, "These sculptures are not bodies gesturing, they are the gestures themselves.”

As an iconic figure in American Modernist sculpture, Barrett is considered a leader in the second generation of American metal sculptors. His work has been highly influenced by that of predecessors such as David Smith, Henry Moore, and Arshile Gorky. He has been exhibiting his work since the mid1960s and has been included in many museum exhibitions and international art expositions—the Whitney Sculpture Annual in 1970, Art Basel in 1989, the Tokyo Expo in 1990, and the Armory Show in New York in 1996, to name only a few. Barrett attended the University of Michigan from 1954 to 1960 and earned his BS and MS in Design and his MFA from the same institution.

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Bill Barrett Plexus, 2019 Fabricated bronze, 112 x 176 x 98 inches

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Bill Barrett Matador (Artist Proof, Ed. of 12), 1985 Cast bronze, 10.25 x 8.50 x 6 inches

Bill Barrett Magic III, 2017 Cast bronze, 15 x 12 x 10 inches

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Bill Barrett Family Portrait, 2005 Fabricated bronze, 32.50 x 39.50 x 27 inches

Forrest Moses (1934-2021)

Forrest Moses’ masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures.

Considered one of America’s most accomplished contemporary painters of abstracted landscape, and with a distinguished career of more than 54 years, Forrest Moses painted graceful visual responses to place through distinctive and complex rhythms of color, lines, and form. His work is acclaimed for its ability to reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple experience of being in nature.

Moses’ masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, and expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation. Rather than seeking to capture the landscape with verisimilitude, Moses’ goal is to transform it on canvas, manifesting what he called “an expressionistic response to a figurative subject.” His process is one of distillation into essentials, and a corresponding intensification of artistic response to what he sensed as the poetry of nature, its truth and beauty. He sought in his work to “capture the aliveness” of nature and convey its sense of the sacred in landscape forms simultaneously leaning away from literal reproduction.

Born in Virginia, Forrest Moses was educated at Washington and Lee University and the Pratt Institute in New York. He relocated to Santa Fe in 1969. His monograph, "Forrest Moses," produced by Kensho Editions and printed in Verona, Italy, is an elegant, full-color presentation of this enduring artist’s contribution to modern landscape painting. Moses' work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in prominent private and public collections.

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Forrest Moses October Reflections with Woods, 2001 Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches 31

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Forrest Moses Bosque with Blue, 2004 Oil on canvas, 40 x 96 inches 33

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Forrest Moses Rio Chama at Abiquiu N.M. #2, 1979 Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches 35

Brian Rutenberg Brian Rutenberg's paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of the natural world. Their extraordinary visual energy is fresh and vital and helps to convey “the idea that that painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.”

Nature forms the inspiration for Brian Rutenberg’s sumptuous abstract orchestrations of color, line, and space. His intention is to create what he calls “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking” and to express his own brimming sense of wonder in the experience of the beauty of the land. With rich color, densely painted surfaces, and vague references to elements of landscape, his paintings evince an aesthetically powerful conjunction between the intuitive and the seen, the felt and the observed.

Rutenberg’s work has been described as “possessing” the landscape, evoking a sense of being in the midst of the woods rather than looking at a picture of one. His works have the quality of participatory feeling rather than detached observation. About this he says, “My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. Here was the whole of a view, not from above looking down, but from a mollusk’s vantage point, a million miles close.”

Rutenberg is a graduate of the College of Charleston, South Carolina. He participated in his first group exhibition in 1985. He moved to New York and received a Master of Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts there. As a young and ambitious painter, he sought to capture a unique evocation of the landscape through abstraction. The base of his interest stems from growing up between Pawley’s Island and Charleston, where river and lake merge with ocean. His early childhood memories continue to be a presence in his painting.

In 1997, Rutenberg received a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland. He has also been the recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Studio Grant, the Basil Alkazzi Award, and various other awards and recognitions. He cites as artists whose work has been inspirational Neo-Expressionist Gregory Amenoff, as well as pivotal figures of Abstract Expressionist painting such as Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofmann. His work is included in major public and private collections.

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Brian Rutenberg Phlox 3, 2016 Oil on linen, 82 x 60 inches

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Brian Rutenberg Banner of the Coast (Bright Before), 2023 Oil on linen, 40 x 60 inches

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Brian Rutenberg Widening Stream, 2017 Oil on linen, 52 x 68 inches

Linda Stojak Linda Stojak is an extraordinarily accomplished painter whose successful career spans more than three decades. She is noted for exploring the convergences between the corporeal and the ethereal in the context of spare, though emotionally complex female forms. Within the liminal space between identity and anonymity she presents alluring emanations, veiled in mystery, that invite a personal search for meaning.

These figures read less as individuals but instead as timeless specters of humanity and feminity.

Some of her figures hover on the canvas like ghosts, receding into smoky, sensuous darkness, while others are grounded in thick outlines that link firmly with their backgrounds. Close observation of her surfaces of apparently monochromatic color reveals an incredible range of tonality and finely-graded hue. These layered canvases of deeply textured, expressively applied oil paint attest to a laborious process that limits her output to only a few paintings each year.

Stojak imbues her paintings with rich atmosphere and a reductive sense of suggestion through only the essential. Her figures are solitary, alone, but not lonely. Stojak says, "My hope is for my work to help people accept the emotions in themselves."

The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, Stojak has been reviewed by "Art in America" and "The New York Times." Edward Leffingwell of "Art in America" wrote of her work, "There is something hard-won about these anxiously drawn, oddly romantic figures that in their tense grace recall the drawings of Giacometti and Rothenburg." With a master's degree from Pratt University, Stojak's acclaimed painting is included in private and museum collections across the country, among which are the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Brown University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Linda Stojak Untitled (Figure 122), 2021 Oil on canvas, 61.75 x 62 inches

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Linda Stojak Untitled (Figure 112), 2019 Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

Linda Stojak Untitled (Figure 141), 2023 Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

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Linda Stojak Untitled (Visage 23), 2019 Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

Roy Lichtenstein is an iconic American Pop Artist whose most well-known works were comic strip style images referencing popular culture.

Although he experimented throughout his career with various artistic styles including Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, Lichtenstein helped form the Pop Art movement during the 1960s, alongside artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist.

Lichtenstein took classes at the Art Students League of New York in 1940, where he studied with American realist painter Reginald Marsh. In the late 1940s and 50s he exhibited his art in galleries throughout the country. In the 1960s, Lichtenstein created what is now known as his iconic comic-book or newsprint style art. He later expanded into printmaking and sculpture, incorporating other compositional elements into his work. Lichtenstein's art is held in notable private and public collections around the world, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Tate Modern in London.

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©Jack Mitchell

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Roy Lichtenstein Bull No.1 (42/100), 1973 Linocut on paper, 27 x 35 inches 50

Roy Lichtenstein Bull No. VI (42/100), 1973 Lithograph, screenprint, & linocut on paper, 27 x 35 inches 51

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 lewallengalleries.com | sgonzalez@lewallengalleries.com © 2023 LewAllen Galleries back cover: Jivan Lee, West from 150 in the Snow, 2022, Oil on panel, 30 x 36 inches Artwork © Each Artist