Ronald Davis The Paintings: 1960s through 2010 by David Richard Gallery

Ronald Davis The Paintings: 1960s through 2010

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

ISBN: 978-1-955260-54-1 Front Cover: Ronald Davis, Double Diagonal, 1969, Polyester resin and fiberglass, 58 x 129” Title Page: Ronald Davis, Lemon, 1969, Molded polyester resin and fiberglass, 50.5 x 132” Back Cover: Installation view: Ronald Davis The Paintings: 1960s through 2012 Ronald Davis The Paintings: 1960s through 2012 October 17 - November 17, 2023 Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 311, 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. Catalogue: © 2023 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Artworks: Copyright © Ronald Davis 1964 - 2010 Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Images by Yao Zu Lu

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

Ronald Davis The Paintings: 1960s through 2010

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

RONALD DAVIS IS NOT DOING WHAT YOU’RE SEEING DAVE HICKEY

Ronald Davis was born in Santa Monica in 1937, and snatched away to Cheyenne, Wyoming for a high plains childhood that failed to prepare him for cosmopolitan cotillions. After high school, Davis worked at sheet metal for two years and attended the University of Wyoming. Then, finally, inspired by Jackson Pollock’s Wyoming roots, and Pollock’s escape from them, he caught the art virus and set off in the direction of being a great artist. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. He received a National Endowment grant. In 1965, he moved back to Los Angeles and discovered his one true mentor, the legendary dealer, Nicolas Wilder. In 1967 and 1968, Davis had his first exhibitions in New York, first at Tibor de Nagy and then at Leo Castelli. Out of these exhibitions he sold paintings to the Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Gallery, London, the Los Angeles County Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The Chicago Museum of Art. He was included in Documenta ’68 in Kassel, and in the US pavilion of the Venice Biennale in ’72. This, for a young painter at that time, was considered a good start, and Davis’ artworks remained in vogue for another twenty years. Even so, since the art world is heavily front-loaded, there is a good chance that you don’t know Ronald Davis’ artworks, and, if you don’t, you should. He is part of a change that altered the ontology of the art world, and the wheel is coming round again. From 1964 to 1975 Davis painted his Dodecagons, the greatest series of abstract objects made in the United States in the twentieth century. These twelve-angled pieces of resin, polyester and fiberglass made Davis rich and famous, as they should have, but Davis liked the adulation less that he thought he would. The cultural mise en scene at that time was big hats, scarves, and handmade boots and Ronald will explain to you today that, not only was he born to be an artist, he was born to be a starving artist because he requires the hands-on discipline – the intense quality of attention – that works best at the edge of catastrophe. Also, Davis didn’t like blue chip work habits: You had to work in the summer, which boys from Wyoming rarely do. You built ten objects for an east coast show. You built ten more for a west coast show. Twenty years of this frazzles the mind, since, in the rush from one to ten, one misses a lot of exits. The quality of the objects stayed steady since Davis don’t do no junk. So he retired, moved to Taos, built a village of hogans and set about refining and upgrading what he’d done. The reasons for Davis’ defection are legion. The first time I asked him why he moved, he said it was to get away from Frank Gehry and a clingy girlfriend although the reasons have changed over the years.

The Gehry-Davis kerfuffle began when Davis asked Frank to build him a studio in Malibu based on the footprint of a shaped, Davis artwork. It was done and Gehry was declared the puto of postmodernism, and the studio was so full of architects proclaiming Frank’s genius, that Davis couldn’t get much work done. Davis’ contribution to the studio underwent slow erasure, because architecture always needs a hero and art has outgrown this defect. So Davis began manifesting anxiety symptoms. He wanted a studio for himself. He was miffed by symposiums about his studio to which he wasn’t invited. Architects had colonized his first studio. No big whoops, but Davis was a Wyoming boy. Today, hoganed in Taos, Davis is still working steadily. He studies representational techniques, argues with his neighbors. He rarely mentions that “Frank Gehry’s post-modern masterpiece” was in fact Ronald Davis’ “first minimalist sculpture” – a difficult object on a plain at the ‘Bu. Having told you this story here, there is an additional point to be made. Los Angeles then isn’t Los Angeles now. The Los Angeles art world now is just about perfect. It is not ideal, because, in an ideal art world, price and value harmonize — this according to Leo Castelli. Even so, anything you want from anywhere is readily available. Consultants, critics, market advisors, authenticators and art-whisperers sprinkle the sidewalks like beach sand. Billions of dollars that might have been spent on art, have been invested in huge warehouses to display art that has just gone out of fashion, further reinforcing the idea of Los Angeles as a provincial city. Rich collectors who can afford it buy art, but can’t be bothered with taking care of it. The artists today all have BFA’s and loftier honors, like tenure. Nearly everyone has an income and many have benefits. Fifty years ago, Los Angeles was Timbuktu with surf, big signs, and canyons with naked avatars. (I’ve seen them dancing in the morning mist over by George Herms’ house.) The artists in that alien wasteland knew two things: They weren’t in New York and they weren’t even sure they were artists. They all had fallback positions: They might masquerade as architects, gigolos, waiters, motorcycle racers, surfers, fashion models, pornographers, couturiers, movie actors, chefs, and extras. Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston had a graphics store with invoices and business cards. Many claimed to be musicians and many, like Mason Williams, were, so you had to convince these outliers that they were artists because art, for them, art was this singular, magical, mundane thing that saved your life. As many noted at the time, when compared to the New York art, Los Angeles art felt empty, and it still does —and this is not a fault. It just meant you aren’t looking closely enough or at the right thing. New York art, however sleek, felt cluttered with ideas, positions, narratives, commentary, and

cleverly positioned invitations for discourse – an early painting by Frank Stella still feels like a feedlot with too many cows. As a result, the bulk of my early writing consists of reading New York art through Western eyes. I always missed the Heideggerian subtext and I finally decided that I should have been missing it. My New York friends, after all, were trying to get in, you know. All my California friends were trying to get out — out of Freud, Marx, Heidegger, and La Pléiade over by the Whitney. That seemed the right way to be. Ronald Davis was on his way out from jump. In an art world that was rapidly turning grisaille, Davis was a colorist who preferred Itten to Albers. (No Mexico in Albers.) In a discourse of paintings that were willfully flat to the eye, Davis proudly produced muscular fields of illusion that infected colors with subtle nuance. In a discourse that was gradually embracing “time-based-art,” Davis lines were not drawn “in time”. They did not bear the inference of narrative. The lines were “snap-lined” — dead still with a steady penumbra of shadow on either side. Even his “abstract expressionist” explosions are more blobs than gestures, going in every direction at once. In a civilization of canvas, color mixers, and engineers, Ronald was a chemist— an alchemist of epoxy, resins, digital magic, and fiberglass. He was alone among his peers like Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn in his avant technology, alone among the artists he inspired, like Robert Irwin and Peter Alexander, in his shameful complexity. He owed a debt to Kelly and Stella but that was paid in full with his first New York show in which he became their peer. Lynda Benglis owed a debt to Davis, but that is almost too obvious to mention, because all that they had done was disappearing — being replaced by text and Xeroxed photographs and what could be further from a Dodecagon that that. My point here, as Davis will tell you, is that Ronald Davis is not really making paintings, not properly, no more than Robert Irwin’s scrims are paintings. Davis is making objects positioned on the wall as Donald Judds are positioned on the floor (and the wall, too). So today, in retrospect, it’s easy to see that the shaped object on the wall, enlivens that whole wall; the snap-lines that seem to stop at the edge of the wall enliven that wall. Object-makers from Kelly to Stella to Davis are the bastard fathers of that emptiness. The fact that this has never been argued before, I attribute to the fact that east coast critics are looking at and looking for the wrong things. They are looking for pictures and composition. They should be looking at feigned illusion and flat-lined opticality. Here are two simple California examples: Ed Ruscha has a drawing entitled “SHE SURE KNOW HER DEVOTIONALS”. It’s more a feigned quote than drawing but New York critics think semantics. They want to know who “she” is? Who is responsible for the intensive “sure?” They are looking for se-

mantics. Ruscha is looking at phonetics. What are three formulations of the “shh” phoneme in English: She. Sure. –tionals. Academics look at Davis’ “Five Twelfths” and see garden furniture. Davis sees a complex field for illusory opticality frozen flat because you’re supposed to see what’s there. All this is more a guess than an argument, of course, so, many times, I think, Davis, in his bitchy, contrarian mode just sees things backward. He will take Jackson Pollock’s bottom-to-top practice of layering and glazing color and turn it around. He will begin with the geometric pizza pan, paint and pour opaque color blobs into their places, then add translucent overlapping resins, then pull the pizza from the tray and see what it looks like. It looks like a Pollock painted backwards but who in the hell ever thought of that? Ronald Davis did. Part of my point here is nobody “loves” a Davis, a Stella or a Bridget Riley. The paintings present us with a complex invitational form of dirty dancing and not everyone is up to this category of response. As a result, the paintings are as sexy as they are aggressive and exciting. Even so, they still propose that we see them as they are, flat and still, so one pushes back against the chromatic distortions to achieve some sort of ground zero, if only for a moment. I am not, however, proposing some art-historical teleology in which images move from concave to flat to convex. I am simply proposing that artists go where the energy is, if that is their predisposition. I saw Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm flat and still one time. I fought my way back through all that fettuccine to the frozen thing. I saw what Pollock had painted. It was magnificent and a great place to start with Pollock. Most viewers these days just presume that Pollock is portraying a “dance,” and leave them behind about one quarter realized. The idea that his lines have direction is still one percent calculus and 99 percent gris-gris. My point here is that, with Davis, Stella or Riley, we stop the image on the wall. The idea is not to seduce but to render something complex plain. All of these works have nuanced answers that exploit the Dodecagons’ twelve foot horizontal width — a size that guarantees a one-picture wall, an architectural footprint like the one Davis conjured up for Frank Gehry to build. The historical revisionism in the paintings of Davis, Stella and Kelly, of Anthony Caro’s sculptures of that time, is lost to us now, even though the history of all the objects that followed them could not exist without their precedent. Sometimes first is best, so consider the default mode of modern art in, say, 1935. Every painting had a frame. Every sculpture had a base, everything rhymed rectangles. There was a rectangular wall, upon which a rectangular frame was hung, within which a modern painting was enclosed.

What happens next, in the 50’s and early 60’s is that painters like Davis, Kelly and Stella dispense with the frame. Without the frame, the wall upon which the paintings were hung became a ground rather than a support. This figure-ground relationship between the painting and the wall was intensified when these paintings began to skew off the rectangle. It was intensified further with Davis’ illusionary excavations into the center of the painting and into the ground supplied by the wall. Anthony Caro’s dispensing with the base and the volume of his sculpture had a similar effect. In both cases the space of the painting and sculpture was aestheticized. This fiat allowed art to conquer the room or the lawn. With the walls of the gallery de facto aestheticized, the entire artistic mise en scene was altered. The walls masquerading grounds enclosed what began to be called an “art space” within which anything might take on the character of art. A home for minimalist sculpture, conceptual art and installation art was created. This, because you just can’t sit a minimal work of art or an installation out in the hallway like a Rodin or a tub of palms. The space needed to exist, the shaped paintings made it an active space that provided an aura for all within it. Minimalism, conceptual art, and installation art follow from there and proliferate, along with a vague idea of the gallery space as a secular church. So, by 1965, 1935 was gone, and the environment of art blossomed like a flower. By 1975 Ronald Davis was becoming gradually inured to proving the same equation again and again and so began a return to loose painting (his Music” series). He ultimately retired to Taos to pursue more exotic projects. So if we pursue the torturous flailing of American art in the 1960’s, Davis’ paintings, which never used paint, stand somewhere near the center, seducing the wall within and without the painting itself, creating an activated pace within which painting could not naturally develop, as Al Held mistakenly believed. Rather the space, exploded, demoting what came before and elevating what came after, and within this apotheosis, the colorful, shaped objects of Davis, Kelly and Stella were routinely treated as transitions — they weren’t; they were the key that turned to unlock the future. By Dave Hickey, 2015, Ronald Davis is Not Doing What You’re Seeing (Courtesy of the Dave Hickey Estate).

Originally published in the catalog accompanying the Untitled Art Fair exhibition of Ronald Davis’s artworks by Nyehaus, New York, during Miami Basel, December 2015.

Ronald Davis Crosby, 1978 Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 41.5 x 65.63 x 1.5”

Ronald Davis Lemon, 1969 Molded polyester resin and fiberglass 50.5 x 132”

Ronald Davis Three Polygon Slabs, 1988 Cel-Vinyl Acrylic Copolymer and Nova Gel on Birch Plywood 30.13 x 52.625”

Ronald Davis 127 Pound Butterfly, 1986 Cel-vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 84 x 60”

Ronald Davis Rose Red Taper, 2009 Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic 47.63 x 31.75 x 6”

Ronald Davis Double Diagonal, 1969 Polyester resin and fiberglass 58 x 129”

Double Diagonal, 1969 Detail View: Right Side

Double Diagonal, 1969 Detail View: Left Side

Ronald Davis Spool, 1996 Encaustic wax and pigment on birch plywood 40.5 x 53.5 x 1.25”

Ronald Davis Green - Blue V-Rift, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 34.5 x 2.5”

Ronald Davis Zig Zag Times Two, 1966 Acrylic on shaped canvas 84.75 x 61.625”

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

Ronald Davis Jericho, 2002 Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic 91 x 102”

Ronald Davis Gebo, 1979 Cel-vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 66 x 84 x 1.25”

Ronald Davis Interior Vent, 1974 Cel-vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 111 x 63 x 3.75”

Ronald Davis Three Color Wave, 2009 Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic 35.5 x 54.25 x 3”

Ronald Davis Pier - Peer, 1963 Acrylic on canvas 68.5 x 59.75 x 3.25”

Ronald Davis Wave, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 95.25 x 69.75 x 1.25”

Ronald Davis Dr. Zig Wig, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 116 x 103 x 1.25”

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

Ronald Davis Hexagon Block, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 93.5 x 61.75 x 3.25”

Ronald Davis Double Diamond, 1965 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 156.5 x 5”

Ronald Davis Yellow U-Wedge, 1966 Acrylic on shaped canvas 64.5 x 108.75 x 3.75”

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

Ronald Davis Back Up, 1969 Polyester resin and fiberglass 60.5 x 136”

Ronald Davis Big Open Box, 1975 Cel-vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 111 x 142.75”

Ronald Davis Tri-Lift Slabes, 1987 Cel-vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 96 x 66 x 2.25”

Ronald Davis Three Part Fillet, 1988 Cel-Vinyl Acrylic Copolymer and Nova Gel on Birch Plywood

Ronald Davis Four-Forths Cylinder, 1996 Acrylic on shaped canvas 36.5 x 43.5”

Ronald Davis Crimson Rift, 2002 Acrylics on expanded PVC plastic 36 x 47.5 x 3.5”

Ronald Davis: Visualizing

Ronald Davis, The Paintings: 1960s through 2010, an exhibition surveying the optically stimulating and perceptually challenging paintings spanning six decades of the artist’s career that were produced in his California and New Mexico studios. Davis explored many new and unconventional painting supports and media throughout his career, including acrylic on canvas; molded polyester resin and fiberglass; acrylic and dry pigment on canvas; Cel-Vinyl acrylic copolymer and Nova Gel on Birch plywood; encaustic wax and pigment on birch plywood; and acrylics on expanded PVC plastic. This presentation includes 27 geometric, hard-edge, and color-based abstract paintings created from 1963 to 2010. They mostly have shaped perimeters with some rectangular canvases that in the aggregate map Davis’s career-spanning investigations of illusory space and optical effects in the two-dimensional picture plane. His explorations began with the early 1960s paintings and series of minimalist Monochrome paintings from 1965; to his very well-known large scale, shaped, and molded resin paintings of slabs, dodecagons, and cubes (1966-1972); then to the perspectival Snapline (1975 – 1978) and geometric Floater (1978 – 1979) series, both acrylic paint on canvas; the Slabette series (1982 – 1985) and Ray Trace paintings (1982 – 1989); on to the Wax Series of encaustic paintings on wood (1996 – 1999); then on to the Hinge Series (2001 – 2002) and NuShape series (2002 – 2010); and finally, a return to the Shaped Paintings (2009 – 2010). Fourteen of the artworks will be installed and hung on the gallery walls and the rest included in the exhibition catalog with a detailed checklist. A digital exhibition catalog includes an essay by Dave Hickey from 2015, Ronald Davis is Not Doing What You’re Seeing (Courtesy of the Dave Hickey Estate). Ronald Davis’s Early Years – Influences and Motivations: In the early 1960s, Davis was fresh out of his studies at the Art Institute of San Francisco, heavily influenced by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and expressionism. However, faced with the monumental accomplishments of such giants of abstract modernism, he realized he had to find his own voice and visual language. Stating that he “strove to expand the boundaries of painting, not the boundaries of what was then becoming art”[1], he did so by jumping back into the history of early Renaissance painting, specifically Paolo Uccello and Duccio and their early reinvention of perspective illusion. By focusing on extreme vector geometry, potent color interactions per Johannes Itten, and optical effects, he found his way. More specifically, Davis stated, “I set up tensions in my paintings; between the flatness of the canvas and the illusion of the depicted abstract objects; between the painterly and the hard edge; between color and color; between light and shadow. These paintings attempt to probe the dimensions of time and space, while not existing in time at all, the whole artwork being viewable in an instant.”[2] The combination of dualities and internal tensions within each painting resulted in imagery expanding (literally) and popping (figuratively) out of a traditional square or rectangular picture plane and into shaped perimeters that gave the illusion of rectangular boxes, pentagons, parallelograms, diamonds, and bent planks, each protruding off the wall. Such illusions became an easy leap to painting much larger, intensely optical imagery and leveraging three-point perspective in molded polyester resin, protruding canvases, encaustic on shaped wood supports, expanded PVC, and canvases in various shapes and sizes.

Regarding Davis’s early rectangular and shaped acrylic paintings from 1963 to 1965 (not including the Monochrome Paintings), other than Dr. Zig Wig, 1964, which was exhibited at Stanford University in 1964, none of those paintings had ever been presented publicly until 2022 in Davis’s solo exhibition, Optical, Shaped and Color Abstractions: Paintings 1963 – 1965, at David Richard Gallery in New York. In particular, the painting Hexagon Block, 1965, has a back label from the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, where Davis was first represented and the year of his first solo show with Wilder. Hexagon Block, 1965 was discussed and image included in an essay written by Barbara Rose for the exhibition “A New Aesthetic” that she organized for the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in Washington D.C. in 1967.[3] During those early years in the 1960s, Davis met lifelong friend and colleague, New York lyrical abstraction painter Ronnie Landfield, whose influence and encouragement have been vital to Davis’s ongoing productivity. Even though Davis lived and worked in California among his Light And Space movement colleagues, he maintained substantive relationships with Landfield and other New York painters and intellectuals such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, all of whom inspired Davis’s artistic explorations, meditations, and intellectual exchanges, even if sometimes from afar. Ronald Davis’s Artworks and Career: Ronald Davis, a multidisciplinary artist always inspired by visual arts and music, has explored theories of abstraction during his 7-decade career through: painting on canvas, 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 compositions 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 illusion 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 Mondrian 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, pushing 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 Nicholas 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 1966 through 1972, with their extreme perspectival geometry that had flat surfaces while the interior confines of the geometric shapes were painted in a very gestural and expressionistic 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 exhibition 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: “Documenta International”, Ausstellung, Kasel, Germany, 1968 and “U. S. A., XXXVI International Biennial Exhibition of Art”, Venice, Italy, 1972.[4] 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 Series, 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. In 1993 Davis moved his home and studio to a compound of buildings based on the Navajo Hogan designed in collaboration with architect 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 explorations 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 as 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 passing, 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.

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.

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.

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

David Eichholtz New York, October 2023

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.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY