De Wain Valentine | Ronald Davis | Dean Fleming

De Wain Valentine | Ronald Davis | Dean Fleming

Table of contents:

Front Cover: De Wain Valentine, Rectangular Column, 1973, Cast polyester resin, 25 1/2” x 6 1/8” x 5”

Page 1 De Wain Valentine, Rectangular Column, 1973, Cast polyester resin, 25 1/2” x 6 1/8” x 5”

Page 2 De Wain Valentine, Rectangular Column, 1973, Cast polyester resin, 25 1/2” x 6 1/8” x 5”

Page 3 De Wain Valentine, Rectangular Column, 1973, Cast polyester resin, 25 1/2” x 6 1/8” x 5”

Page 4 Ronald Davis, Lemon, 1969, Molded polyester resin and fiberglass, 50.5 x 132 “

Page 6 Ronald Davis, First Bent Beam, 1964, Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 29 x 3.5”

Page 10 Ronald Davis, Sea-Green Trapezoid, 1966, Acrylic on shaped canvas, 34 x 67.75 x 3.25”

Page 12 Ronald Davis, Zig Zag Times Two, 1966, Acrylic on shaped canvas, 84.75 x 61.625“

Page 14 Ronald Davis, Three Polygon Slabs, 1988, Cel-Vinyl Acrylic Copolymer & Nova Gel on Birch Plywood, 30 1/8 x 52 5/8”

Page 16 Ronald Davis, Two-Thirds Lock Slabettes, 1985, Acrylic on shaped canvas 50 x 93 x 2.75”

Page 20 Ronald Davis, Jericho, 2002, Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic, 91 x 102“

Page 22 Dean Fleming, 65 Yellow White and Black (353), 1965, Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 89.5“

Page 24 Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery

Page 26 Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery

Page 28 Dean Fleming, 65 Black, 1965, Acrylic on canvas, 32 x 32 x 1”

Page 30 Dean Fleming, 65 Green Red Yellow, 1965, Acrylic on canvas, 32 x 32“

Page 32 Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery

Page 34 Installation Dean Fleming Fourth Dimension at David Richard Gallery

Page 36 Ronald Davis Biography

Page 40 Dean Fleming, Fourth Dimension , catalog essay

Page 44 Dean Fleming Biograpghy

Price quotes are in US dollars (USD$), valid for 30 days from the original offer, and subject to prior sales and availability of the artwork. Quotes do not include packaging, shipping, insurance, applicable taxes, customs charges, duties, nor installation costs.

Published by:

David Richard Gallery, LLC, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9E, New York, NY 10001 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555

DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery

Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers

All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

De Wain Valentine

Rectangular Column, 1973 Cast polyester resin 25 1/2” x 6 1/8” x 5”

Retail Price: $100,000— Offered At: $ 85,000—

Ronald Davis

Lemon, 1969

Molded polyester resin and fiberglass

50.5 x 132 “

Retail Price: $ 250,000—

Offered At: $ 210,000—

4

Ronald Davis

First Bent Beam, 1964 Acrylic on canvas

59 x 29 x 3.5”

Retail Price: $ 60,000—

Offered At: $ 51,000—

6

Ronald Davis

Sea-Green Trapezoid, 1966 Acrylic on shaped canvas

34 x 67.75 x 3.25”

Retail Price: $ 80,000— Offered At: $ 68,000—

10

Ronald Davis

Zig Zag Times Two, 1966 Acrylic on shaped canvas

84.75 x 61.625“

Retail Price: $ 120,000— Offered At: $ 102,000—

Ronald Davis

Three Polygon Slabs, 1988 30 1/8 x 52 5/8” overall

Cel-Vinyl Acrylic Copolymer & Nova Gel on Birch Plywood Ray Trace Shape Series

Retail Price: $ 60,000—

Offered At: $ 51,000—

Provenance: Artist Studio Private Collection, New Mexico

Ronald Davis

Two-Thirds Lock Slabettes, 1985 Acrylic on shaped canvas

50 x 93 x 2.75”

Retail Price: $ 110,000— Offered At: $ 93,000—

Ronald Davis

Jericho, 2002

Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic 91 x 102“

Retail Price: $ 115,000—

Offered At: $ 95,000—

20

Dean Fleming

65 Yellow White and Black (353), 1965 Acrylic on canvas

70 x 89.5“

Retail Price: $ 85,000—

Offered At: $ 72,000—

Dean Fleming

65 Black, 1965

Acrylic on canvas

32 x 32 x 1”

Retail Price: $ 35,000—

Offered At: $ 30,000—

28

Dean Fleming

65 Green Red Yellow, 1965

Acrylic on canvas 1965 32 x 32“

Retail Price: $ 35,000—

Offered At: $ 30,000—

30

Ronald Davis, a multidisciplinary artist always inspired by visual arts and music, has explored theories of abstraction during his 7-de cade career through: painting on canvas, with pigment imbedded in polyester resin, on expanded PVC, wood, and paper as well as drawing, sculpture, three-dimensional computer modeling, digital painting, and electronic music and sound sculpture. His visual com positions have consistently utilized geometry and hard edge painting combined with intense color interactions, chromatic relationships and extreme vanishing point perspective to create internal tensions on supports that are bound within the two-dimensional picture plane, while the imagery painted on the surface suggests three-dimensional space that creates compelling optical effects and the illu sion of literal objects rather than a picture of an object.

Influenced early on by: Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman; gestural color painters Morris Louis and Sam Francis; as well as Frank Lobdell, Jack Jefferson, Fred Martin, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff while studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 to 1964. During this time, Davis was finding his unique approach and aesthetic. He did not want to follow in the footsteps of the AbEx masters who influenced him, and not certain he could expand upon their prevailing expressionistic style of the time, nor paint “man’s physical limitations.”1 However, Davis stated that he “discovered [he] could paint a stripe. And later, checker-boards. Abstract geometric objects.” He further stated that his “strategy became to do a Mon drian in the style of Jackson Pollock, and a Pollock in the style of Mondrian,” and that his instructor, “Frank Lobdell, emphasized the importance of what you leave out of a painting, not what you put in.”1 All together, the perfect storm was brewing within Davis, push ing him toward hard edge, geometric painting that helped him see how to push the edge of the pictorial space out of the conventional and into new materials and dimensions, literally with shaped perimeters and molded resin infused with pigment.

In 1964 Davis moved to Los Angeles and had his first solo exhibition with the Nick Wilder Gallery in 1965. He had his first solo show in New York at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1966 followed by a solo show at Leo Castelli in 1968. During this seminal period, his painting practice migrated to the large, molded resin and fiberglass paintings produced from from 1966 through 1972, with their extreme per spectival geometry that had flat surfaces while the interior confines of the geometric shapes were painted in a very gestural and ex pressionistic style, yet the paintings read as a three-dimensional object. In 1967 Michael Fried wrote in ARTFORUM that Davis’s paintings were “at the forefront of his generation. In at least two respects Davis’ work is characteristically Californian: it makes impressive use of new materials — specifically, plastic backed with fiberglass — and it exploits an untrammeled illusionism.”2 And further, “Davis’ new work achieves an unequivocal identity as painting.”2 Davis was included in the exhibition “A New Aesthetic” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967, organized by Barbara Rose who wrote in the catalog that, “Ron Davis is the single artist in this exhibi tion who has appropriated the new materials toward the end of painting.”3 Rose further stated that Davis’s “use of a complex pictorial illusionism relates them to the tradition of easel painting, rather than to the new literalist objects.”3 Several of Davis’s contemporaries, Larry Bell, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander and John McCracken, were also exploring the new acrylic plastics that were developed and used industrially for auto bodies, surf boards and in the aerospace industry, but in very different ways than Davis, each producing literal shapes of a uniform translucent color as part of the Light and Space movement and other aesthetic purposes.

The 1960s and 70s were a productive, creative time for Davis and his new shaped, cast polyester resin paintings were in high demand. His paintings were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Chicago Art Institute in 1968. Davis was a National Endowment for the Arts grantee in 1968 and his paintings included in international exhibitions: “4 Documenta International”, Ausstellung, Kasel, Germany, 1968 and “U. S. A., XXXVI International Biennial Exhibition of Art”, Venice, Italy, 1972.

Davis moved to Malibu, California in 1972 where he designed a new studio and home with architect Frank Gehry. He spent a year learning silkscreening, lithography, etching, and papermaking from Ken Tyler at Gemini, G.E.L. and Tyler Graphics, Bedford, New York. Returning to painting on canvas in 1973, Davis continued pushing the edges of illusionism in the pictorial space by expanding his use of new supports and media while further leveraging geometry, perspective, color relationships and optical effects. The well-known series included: “the large scale Snapline Series in 1975-78; Floater Series, 1978-79; Flatland Series, 1980-81; Object Paintings, 1982; Music Se ries, a segue from geometry and back to expressionist paintings, in 1983-85, which becomes an important point and aspect in Davis’s career; Freeway and Freeline Series, 1987; and Spiral Series, 1988.”4 Davis also began using the Macintosh computer and many new programs and software for rendering, modeling, and researching three-dimensional space.

Ronald Davis’s Artworks and Career:

In 1993 Davis moved his home and studio to a compound of buildings based on the Navajo Hogan designed in collaboration with archi tect Dennis Holloway and anthropologist Charley Cambridge. Returning to painting in 1995 and continuing with his interest in shaped supports, he produced a series of paintings with encaustic (wax) that straddled the pictorial space and objecthood. No surprise that he also became more fascinated with three-dimensional computer modeling, painting, and printing.

A significant breakthrough occurred in 2002 with Davis producing a large new series of paintings of acrylic medium on expanded PVC for the supports. This led to multiple exhibitions of the new paintings, additional museum acquisitions, and a retrospective exhibition, “Ronald Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction, 1962 - 2002,” at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio in 2002 that included forty paintings, sculptures, and prints spanning four-decade. Davis continued his work with computers, 3-D modeling, and printing, collaborating with fabricators and producing highly illusionistic imagery on metal supports.

Davis was included in the exhibition “Pacific Standard Time: Crossroads in LA Painting and Sculpture,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the Getty Research Foundation in Los Angeles in 2011. He had numerous survey presentations and exhibitions of his many significant bodies of historic and newly created artworks throughout the 2000s. He continues to explore computers for his love of three-dimensional space and adapting new technologies and has returned to painting again in 2021, producing a new series for an upcoming solo exhibition.

The newest series of paintings from 2021 and 2022 are mentioned specifically, as well as the other times in 1973 and 1995 when Davis retuned to painting on more conventional supports and/or media, because painting has been at the center of his career and accounts for most of his artistic production. His forays into new materials and processes come out of his intense interest in new possibilities and ways to present optical effects and illusory imagery in paintings. Sometimes the new materials and near-literalness of those explo rations go beyond the usual perceptual blurring of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. In 1967, Barbara Rose noted this difference between illusion and literalism in Davis’s early works. In 2002, Davis said, “This struggle between object and the pictorial remains central to my work after forty years.”1 The struggle has continued through 2022 after sixty years of making art.

The Music Series from 1983-85 is worth noting again. It is a stunning series of paintings that may seem like an aesthetic departure for Davis. However, Davis has used painterly, gestural mark making and splatters to create the interiors of his geometric shapes as well as the grounds in many series, including: cast polyester resin paintings, 1966-1972; “Snapline Series”, “Object Series” and “Splatter Paintings”. Addressing this binary perceived by some viewers, Davis stated emphatically in 2002, “Constitutionally, I remain a geometrician and an expressionist” 5

Davis has asked the Gallery to dedicate this exhibition to the late art critic and writer Dave Hickey. Says Davis: “Shortly before his pass ing, Hickey penned an essay entitled ‘Ronald Davis Is Not Doing What You’re Seeing.’ Despite our short but valued friendship, Hickey delivered some striking insights and helped define my relevance. In particular, he described how I ‘did things backwards and upside down.’ I recommend reading Hickey’s short essay, linked here.” 6

1 Ronald Davis, Artist Statement. Originally printed in the catalog that accompanied the retrospective, “Ronald Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction, 1962 – 2002,” Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio in October 2002.

2 Fried, Michael, “Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion”, ARTFORUM, Volume 4, No. 8, April 1967, pp.37-41.

3 Barbara Rose, “A New Aesthetic”, 1967, catalog essay published on the occasion of the exhibition, “A New Aesthetic”, organized by Barbara Rose at The Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., May 6—June 25, 1967.

4 Davis, Ronald, “A Short Biography”, 2012 ca, http://irondavis.com/d_artst/d01_Short_Bio.htm.

5 Davis, Ronald, Artist Statement. Originally printed as a single sheet accompanying the exhibition “Ronald Davis: Recent Abstractions, 2001 – 2002”, published by School of Art and History, Denver University, The Victoria H. Myhren Gallery, in September 2002. It was also reprinted in the catalog accompanying the exhibition “Ronald Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction, 1962 - 2002”, The Butler Institute

of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, October 2002.

6 http://irondavis.com/a_art/2010s_Art_Works/2015-Miami-Untitled-Art-Fair/NEW_Hickey_Essay_Ronald_Davis_Is_Not_Doing_ What_You_re_Seeing_and_Untitled_Viewing_Room_EDITED.pdf.

Ronald Davis’s Artworks in Selected Museum Collections:

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IIlinois.

The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

Corcoran Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D. C.

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa

Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado

Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York

Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico

HHK Foundation for Contemporary Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Hillcrest Foundation, Los Angeles, California

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D. C.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, California

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, (MCASD), San Diego and La Jolla, California

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Moursia

Nickle Art Museum, University of Calagary, Alberta, Canada

Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California

The Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, California

Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, California

Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona

San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

San José Museum of Art, San José, California

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska

The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

City Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

The Tate Gallery, London, England

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

Walraff-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York

Witt Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Woodward Foundation, Washington, D. C.

DEAN FLEMING

Fourth Dimension

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Fourth Dimension, a solo exhibition by Dean Flem ing (born 1933, Santa Monica, California) focused primarily on seminal paintings from 1965 that evoked myriad changes in not only the artist’s approach to painting, including the scale, compo sitions, and pallets, but also where he produced and exhibited these works. This is the first presentation of these important paintings in over fifty years, all sourced from the artist’s studio, and a rare opportunity to map the artist’s thinking and progression toward a possible Fourth Dimension. Artworks from the prior year, 1964, are presented as a reference and contrast to emphasize the aesthetic and conceptual shift in Fleming’s studio practice by 1965.

The transformative change in Fleming’s aesthetic during 1964 and 1965 is best characterized as a move from rigorously geometric tessellations and colorful patterning to more reductive, hard edge compositions with minimal palettes and extreme vector angles rooted in both formal and conceptual concerns noted herein.

The current presentation includes ten canvases from 1965: five large (mostly 70 x 90 and 65 x 100 inches in horizontal orientations) and five smaller (32 x 32 inches square) as well as six representative artworks from 1964: two paintings on canvas (82 x 82 and 44 x 44 inches installed on the diagonal as diamond shapes) and smaller gouache paintings on paper (roughly 4.5 inches square to 4 x 6 inches) as a comparison and contrast between each year.

The paintings from 1965 were originally presented in New York at Park Place Gallery in lower Manhattan in a two-person show with Dean Fleming and Tony Magar that inaugurated the gal lery’s new location on West Broadway. Fleming’s very large painting, 2 V Dwan 2, 1965-66, an orange, blue, black, and white acrylic painting comprised of three canvases, each 99 x 66 inches with overall dimensions of 66 x 297 inches, was presented in the exhibition Systemic Painting, organized by Lawrence Alloway at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1966 and published in the corresponding catalog. The painting was named for Virginia Dwan, an early enthusiast, patron and supporter of Fleming and other founding members of the Park Place Gal lery. That same painting was then exhibited in 1967 at the Friends of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado and purchased by a Denver collector. The painting is now in the collection of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

A subset of Fleming’s paintings from 1965 were also presented in 1973 in a solo exhi bition at Wilamaro Gallery located in Denver, Colorado. The gallery was run by Carol Schwartz-Steinberg, the daughter of Vera List, an art collector, who alongside Virginia Dwan, Allen and Betty Guiberson, J. Patrick Lannan, and John and Lupe Murchison, financed Park Place Gallery in exchange for receiving artworks annually from each of the founding members. List acquired one of Fleming’s paintings from that Denver exhibition, which eventually ended up in the collection of the The New School in New York City.

Many of the paintings from this series of works from 1965 were acquired and placed in museums and signifiant private collections. Snap Roll, 1965, originally acquired by James Michener, along with another painting acquired by Betty Blake, are both now in the col lection of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Larry Aldrich acquired two of the paintings for his museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Other notable collectors of Fleming’s art works include: Arthur Ashman, Paula Cooper, Mark diSuvero, Carl Groos, Jack Stuart Kern, Frank Sinatra, among others.

The inspiration for Fleming’s move to the open, hard edge and minimalist compositions in 1965 had been brewing for quite some time. He had a deep interest in understanding the complexities of, and picturing, space in multiple dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas, and was fascinated by the concept and potential of the Fourth Dimension. Both concepts were also long held interests of the founding artist members of the Park Place group, which brought the group together initially in California and later when they formed the collective and exhibition space in lower Manhattan.

Fleming’s Artist Statement Published in the Systemic Painting Catalog:

After considering Fleming’s inspiration for the important series of paintings produced in 1965 as well as the aesthetic and conceptual influences on the compositions, it is interesting to look back at his artist statements from 1965 and 1966 published in the catalog for the Systemic Painting exhibition, and specifically noting the following (Alloway, Lawrence, Systemic Painting, 1966, Guggenheim, p23 ):

I am working in the area of the totally primal and available. Geometry, optics, science and psychology are here used only as tools and, therefore, have only a relative bearing on the significance of the work. [. . .]

In an effort to clarify the subject I have used only straight lines. Most of these paintings can objectively be defined by saying that they are composed of one or two points within the canvas and the connection of these points to the outer edg es.

This approach to the work yields nothing whatsoever and we must venture further to reach significant under- standing. [ . .]

I use color because of its relativity to the human eye and believe in color and not color dogma.

Formally they contain the tensions and lucid changes that exist between the diagonal and the horizontal and vertical. We are already aware of the passivity of the horizontal, the ascension and descension of the vertical, and the dynamics of the diagonal. [. . .]

The subject of art is ultimately spiritual. That vibrant aspect of the nature of existence which demands to be created though it is not called for. Still this new work is utilitarian in that it serves to extend the consciousness of space and time, a necessity for the psychic survival of every new society. Now, when basic forms and primary colors have the strength and velocity to communicate a new dimension, it is the spirit of our times an artist expresses rather than the fact.

David Eichholtz

November 2022 New York

About Dean Fleming:

Fleming studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. There, he met and developed life-long friendships with Peter Forakis, Leo Valledor and Mark di Suvero. He shared a studio with Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Bill Brown and Forakis and “poured” himself “into the West Coast version of abstract expressionism”. During that period he regularly exhibited at the Six Gallery and Batman Gallery in San Francisco.

Fleming moved to New York in 1961 and was a founding member of the Park Place Gallery, an important artist collective and exhibition venue for experimental art in New York in the 1960s. The founding members were interested in working in diverse materials and approaches in painting and sculpture to explore their mutual interest in literal and illusory space, music and social concerns. Fleming’s painting at that time was minimalist, hard edge and geometric with a reductive palette. In 1966, he was included in the important exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Systemic Painting”, organized by Lawrence Alloway.

Moving to the Rocky Mountains in 1967 and founding Libre, an artist community, Fleming started a new chapter in his career. His extensive international travels to Europe, Northern Africa, Latin America and Asia and fascination with diverse cultures and artistic practices continued to inspire and inform his artwork as he explored gestural abstraction, calligraphic and Zen-inspired gestures, and the symbology and natural dyes of Indigenous peoples in North and South America.

Fleming’s artworks are included in the collections of the following museums:

Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut

Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania

Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado

Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C

Denver Museum of Art, Colorado

Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, Indiana

J.P. Lannan Museum, Palm Beach, Florida

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

Nelson-Adkins Gallery, Kansas City, MO

The New School for Social Research, New York, New York

Oakland Museum, California

San Francisco Art Institute, California

Tyler Museum, Tyler, Texas