Ben Aronson VIEWS FROM ABOVE
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Ben Aronson Views from Above
June 21 - July 20, 2019
Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Coastline from Santa Monica, 2019, oil on panel, 30 x 30 inches
Ben Aronson: Views from Above Ben Aronson is recognized as one of America's most respected painters of the contemporary urban landscape. His signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan life and forms – rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks– into radiant and resplendently engaging tableaux of urban geometry and gleaming arrays of motion, light, and shadow. This second solo exhibition of Aronson’s art at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe includes both small- and largescale city paintings that demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity to convey both the visual and sensory details of the urban experience. Aronson’s first LewAllen Exhibition in 2017 was notable for the capacity of the work included to transport the viewer directly into the city side-by-side among its inhabitants. The current exhibition of new work by the artist, entitled Views from Above, features 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 implied from below. These new paintings still evince the uncanny capacity of Aronson to seemingly paint the frozen moment. At a time when contemporary life proceeds at an increasingly frantic pace, Aronson’s paintings offer an oasis: a pause; a brief moment of reflection. These paintings possess a remarkable capacity to suspend motion, slow the tempo, seduce attention, and allow looking. High above the noise, Aronson dissolves the rush and tumult of everyday life to reveal the remaining fundament of beauty present in these places. In their incorporation of surprising perspectives and compositional techniques, these new works cultivate an aura of mystery in conjunction with the application of nuanced areas of pensive shadow and radiant light: sunlight and darkness that glow with pathos. Together these elements coalesce to create novel, evocative ways of perceiving the built environment and the world of the urbanites who dwell and work there. His paintings contain insights into the aspirations and intensity of the city – beckoning to the viewer to experience both its spirit and its soul. Aronson evokes these sentiments with a distinctive painting style that features freely rendered geometric elements that harken back to his early love of architecture as a possible professional calling. Within
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this underlying sense of geometric structure, Aronson’s lines articulate form without the constraints of the literal, hinting at an engaging and pleasurable—if contentious—relationship between order and spontaneity, arresting the viewer’s attention and encouraging sustained looking. “The main objective is not merely to capture physical likeness,” Aronson says, “but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience.” His gestural application of paint – while underpinned by a precision indicative of a remarkable eye for realism – conveys his imagery through suggestions of implied movement and space. With fluid mark-making and a physical surface quality that often leaves his brushstrokes unblended, Aronson’s hand joyously captures fleeting moments that extend through time on his canvases. Alternately rough, rhythmic, or lyrical in tone, Aronson renders this sophisticated engagement with the urban world in fleeting glimpses of movement and evanescent light – the cosmopolitan grid alternately sharpened and blurred into streaking geometry and hard-edged shadow. With their alluring atmospheric qualities, Aronson’s paintings create and privilege a welcome moment of hesitation in looking. They offer the precious value of pausing to really grasp the powerful messages these paintings contain. These paintings of sunlit rooftops and beckoning skies, the viewer’s eyes stretch across the expanse of the city to glimpse what lies beyond – coasts, mountains, or even where the sky meets the earth. The result of Aronson reorienting our perspective to high above the city is imagery that conveys a highly reflective sensibility, built on carefully executed rhythms of shapes and gentle patterns of light and shade. This luminosity, achieved through carefully harmonized colors, translates moments of beautiful stillness that ache with beauty. In these works, the viewer is simultaneously within the city and removed from it, in the same way that moments of self-reflection briefly allow the mind greater insight into experiences of life. Having risen above the noise, we feel, somehow, greater clarity. These new paintings also share commonality with memory, particularly its tendency to record felt impressions more lastingly than any initially sharplyrecorded detail. Only in memory can there be meaning beyond mere sensation. His paintings – like memory, too – blur the boundaries between the precise and the ambiguous to broaden their potential
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for meaning, and to evoke remembered experience of being in the city as well as excitement about what might lie ahead. These new works betray an increasing interest by Aronson in the capacity of shadows to describe not just a light source or time of day, but atmosphere and mood. Likewise, Aronson here hones in on the way light does more than merely illuminate, here providing both soulful tonality and hue to buildings that are themselves perhaps white or grey. Higher off the ground, Aronson’s shapes are more regular, linear, minimal – and yet they speak with a generosity when it comes to space, distance, and atmosphere. Where other painters might, by dint of similar subject matter, force us to sense the pull of gravity downward, Aronson keeps his viewers aloft, weightless, quietly observant. Viewing these paintings, our mind’s eye attends less to earthly matters and instead shifts our focus to matters of the horizon, of where earth and sky greet each other. Through a stunning interplay of colors, light and an expert sense of atmospheric perspective, Aronson crafts moments that arrest—distillations of urban elements that invite one to stop, to approach, and to enter each of his spaces. Broad, sunlit lengths of walls and city streets—texturized with daubs of paint at once nearly imperceptible and essential—draw the eye, permitting one to luxuriate in the warmth of memory and possibility. Aronson uses acute skills of observation and absolute technical expertise to gesture toward the skyline and beckon one to pause—offering, in light and shadow, an antidote to the distractions of modern existence. Aronson was born in Boston to two remarkable artists. His mother, Georgianna Nyman, was the highly respected portrait painter of the United States Supreme Court justices; his father, David Aronson, was a noted sculptor and a founding member of the legendary Boston Figurative Expressionist Movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Ben Aronson enrolled at the School of Fine Arts at Boston University and studied under Reed Kay, John Wilson, and James Weeks, who introduced Aronson to the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Aronson was also under the tutelage of Philip Guston and worked as his studio assistant. Now with work included in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums, Aronson’s remarkable
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portrayal of the material sensations of the city has earned him status as a unique and highly regarded voice in contemporary American landscape painting. Art critics, too, have long been captivated by Aronson’s striking contribution to the tradition of American landscape painting. Art historian Joanna Fink, in 2006, wrote, “Aronson creates a continuum that begins at the turn of the 20th century and ends at the tip of his brush. But while he carries with him the accumulation of his study of the art of the past, it is ultimately Aronson’s own experience, his own hand which guides the brush.” In 2007, arts writer George Tysh noted Aronson’s firm place in art history, positioning him alongside Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Fairfield Porter: “[All four] are realists whose compositions express an acute awareness of underlying geometries and forms, and who never forgot about the paint in painting.”
Hollywood, 2019 oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches
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Pink Sunset, Santa Monica, 2019 oil on panel, 24 x 30 inches 6
Low Sun, Santa Monica, 2019 oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches 7
Angel Island from Russian Hill, 2015 pastel on board, 30 x 30 inches 8
Manhattan 2am, 2014 pastel on board, 30 x 30 inches
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View from a Window, 2019 oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches
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View from a Roof Deck, 2019 oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches 11
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East over Venice, 2019 oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches 13
Beach House, 2019 oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches 14
Coastline from Santa Monica, 2019 oil on panel, 30 x 30 inches 15
Road to the Beach, 2019 oil on panel, 20 x 16 inches
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Santa Monica, Late Afternoon, 2019 oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches
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Southern California Coast, 2019 oil on panel, 72 x 60 inches 18
Southeast over Santa Monica, 2019 oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
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Spring Morning, Fifth Avenue, 2014 oil on panel, 60 x 60 inches 21
Venice Rooftops, 2019 oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches
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Roofs and Gables, Santa Monica, 2019 oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches 23
Chicago River, 2017 oil on panel, 38 x 52 inches 24
Lake Shore, Chicago, 2017 oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches 25
Red Tile Roofs and Ocean, 2019 oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches
Southern California Coast, Palms and Cliffs, 2019 oil on panel, 60 x 28 inches 27
Garden 2, 2018-19 oil on linen, 62 x 44 inches 28
White Building in Sun, 2014-19 oil on panel, 25 7/8 x 24 inches 29
Santa Monica Rooftops, 2019 oil on panel, 48 x 32 inches 30
Rooftops, Southern California, 2019 oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches 31
Rooftops and Ocean, 2019 oil and collage on panel, 48 x 36 inches 32
Silver Light, Rooftops and Coast, 2019 oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches 33
Ben Aronson
b. 1958, Boston, MA
b. 1958, Boston, MA
AWARDS 2006
Childe Hassam Purchase Prize, American Academy of Arts
EDUCATION
and Letters, New York, NY
1980-82 MFA in Painting, Boston University, MA
2005
Academician Appointment, National Academy of Design,
1976-80 BFA in Painting, Boston University, MA
New York, NY
2004
Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize, National Academy of
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Design, New York, NY
2019
Views From Above, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
J. Sanford Saltus Gold Medal, National Academy of Design,
2017
Perspective and the Ephemeral, LewAllen Galleries,
New York, NY
Santa Fe, NM
1992
Ogden M. Pleissner Painting Award, National Academy of
2014
Light and Memory, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San
Design, New York, NY
Francisco, CA
1988
The Blanche E. Coleman Award for Painting
2013
Cityscapes, Asheville Art Museum, NC
Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Grant
Cityscapes, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
The St. Botolph Foundation Grant in Painting
2011
Ann Norton Sculpture Museum, West Palm Beach, FL
1986
The Blanche E. Coleman Award for Painting
Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME
Here and Now, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San
SELECTED PUBLIC & INSTITUTIONAL COLLECTIONS
Francisco, CA
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
2010
Risk and Reward, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH
2009
The Urban Signature, Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
2008
Urban Currents, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA
The Figure in Context, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Francisco, CA
Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, CO
2007
Explorations, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San
De Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA
Francisco, CA
Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Art, East Lansing, MI
2006
Recent Works, Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
2005
Recent Works, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY
Mazovian Museum, Plock, Poland
2004
Painterly Visualizations, Jenkins Johnson Gallery,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
San Francisco, CA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
2003
DFN Gallery, New York, NY
National Academy Museum, New York, NY
2002
Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta
2000
Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
1999
Scott White Contemporary, La Jolla, CA
New Orleans Museum of Art, LA
1998
Sydney Bernard Fine Arts, Hollywood, CA
Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME Orlando Museum of Art, FL
1997
MB Modern, New York, NY
Palm Springs Art Museum, CA
1996
Horwitch Newman Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
San Diego Museum of Art, CA
Jerry Solomon Gallery, Hollywood, CA
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA
1994
Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, CA
34Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2019 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 36 Artwork Š Ben Aronson