Gene Johnson

“Desert Landscape” abstract painting, geometric shapes, blue, pink, yellow

2024

A contemporary painting by NYC's Gene Johnson. A balance of values, texture, line and form. Unframed. Signed "Gene Johnson" on verso. Gene Johnson has been painting and exhibiting ...

A contemporary painting by NYC-based painter, Gene Johnson. Signed on verso: [ "Post Japan 3 Osaka" (Yellow) Acrylic on canvas 2024 47 1/2 x 34 3/4" Gene Johnson ] Artist Bio Gen...

An abstract oil painting, loosely painted en plein air on a beach in the Hamptons. The painting captures a curling wave, just about to crash on the shore, the spray from the top of the wave watching in the wind off the ocean. The painting was done like a sketch done by impressionist artists back in the day, but on a much larger scale. Color notes jotted down urgently to capture the moment before it disperses like sea spray in the breeze. Yektai paints in a thick sculptural fashion...

An abstract oil painting, broad swaths of blue paint poured and spattered onto a raw stretched canvas. White paint has been blended into the blue at the "base" of the composition, ba...

Contemporary geometric colorful abstract painting by Texas-based artist Max Manning. The work features organic and geometric shapes in blue, pink, yellow, and orange tones. Signed, t...

Larry Zox Jean Jean, 1964 Signed, dated, and titled on the stretcher Liquitex on canvas 58 x 62 inches Provenance: Solomon & Co., New York Private Collection, NJ Estate of the above, 2023 Committed to abstraction throughout his career, Larry Zox played a central role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. His work of the time, consisting of brilliantly colored geometric shapes in dynamic juxtapositions, demonstrated that hard-edge painting was neither cold nor formalistic. He reused certain motifs, but he did so less to explore their aspects than to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his essay for Zox’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. By the 1970s, Zox was using a freer, more emotive method, while maintaining the autonomy of color, which increasingly became more important to him than structure in his late years. Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s, when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art, including Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler for the Gallery of Modern Art, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum. In 1973, the Whitney’s solo exhibition of Zox’s work gave recognition to his significance in the art scene of the preceding decade. In the following year, Zox was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum, which owns fourteen of his works. Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University. While studying at the Des Moines Art Center, he was mentored by George Grosz, who despite his own figurative approach encouraged Zox’s forays into abstraction. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with the visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, where he painted and fished including using a helicopter to spot fish. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Zox’s works were collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of intense hues that created ambiguous surfaces. Next, he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation Series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times noted in 1964: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.” In 1965, he began the Scissors Jack...

In this geometric abstract painting in acrylic on paper on linen mounted on panel, hard edge shapes in shades of blue, black, red and yellow are colorf...

Jay Walker's latest series, "Inner Space," analyzes a single motif built from repeating parallel lines that is commonly found in his work. In this series of...