Coming Full Circle
Coming Full Circle
Artwork by Ronnie Landfield
Artwork by Ronnie Landfield
February 19 - April 7, 2015
Lobby Gallery1133 Avenue of the Americas
(between 43rd and 44th)
New York, NY
Open Hours:
Monday - Friday, 8am-7pm
reservations required: contact janusz@chashama.org
Reception for the Artist:
Thursday, April 2, 6-8pm
The title Coming Full Circle evokes the sense that this exhibition expresses a happy resolution of the past 3 tumultuous years in the artist Ronnie Landfield’s life. Hurricane Sandy permanently damaged Landfield's Tribeca studio building where he had been living and working for five decades, necessitating an arduous move of home and studio for him and his family. This exhibition opens two-and-a-half years later as the artist has just completed relocating and building a new studio in upstate New York. Especially poignant are the three paintings from 2012, “One More Day,” “Shifting Plains,” and “In the Distance,” painted in the spring and summer before the storm. Stylistically they are a new direction for Landfield, solid striated layers of more substantial, opaque banded stains—and symbolically they represent a new beginning after a long difficult passage.
The twelve canvasses in Coming Full Circle span an eighteen year period starting in 1997 with “On the Rise.” Over his long distinguished career, Landfield has experimented with the possibilities of the abstract landscape and the role of perspective in the formulation of a nonexistent space. He has embraced and rejected a sense of depth through use of color, form and application of the medium—overwhelmingly semi-transparent washes of acrylic stain. The most controversial formalistic aspect of his work has been the use of solid bands of color along the edges of his paintings as a built in framing mechanism—but we see in Coming Full Circle, how various and unpredictable the work truly is. Whether these paintings are portals on the soul or windows on a shimmering landscape, the parameters remain hazy, and the viewer is presented with a range of readings, especially the more recent works which exist at the intersection of an approximation of place and an abstracted free-wheeling color chart.
The three newest works are insistent exercises in the arrangement of pure color. Earlier works such as “Tennessee Perspective” 2001 and “Bluebird” 2000 engage with the paint stain’s proclivities towards ebb and flow, and offer the random happy accidents in the edge of the forms and consistency of the color saturation as a defining factor in the final appearance of the work. A painting such as “One More Day” leaves much less up to chance, instead guiding the spectator through a series of transformations from one color to the next, almost suggesting that the color be read in a very careful and organized manner—like rhyme or meter in a poem. Coming Full Circle is an exhibition of twelve large scale works that follow the trajectory of an artist’s engagement with his medium. The problems and the themes are the same for each piece, but the solutions are an exciting selection of novel and unexpected answers in enveloping color and form.
- Will Corwin
Artist Biography
Ronnie Landfield was born in New York City in 1947 and has had more than seventy solo exhibitions. His work has been shown in Museums and galleries around the world, including the first Whitney Biennial in 1973. He first exhibited at the David Whitney Gallery, followed by Andre Emmerich and Salander O’Reilly. He has paintings in dozens of museums including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Hirshhorn Collection. He is represented by LewAllen Galleries.
