Ronald Davis Abstract Paintings

Ronald Davis (American, b. 1937) Pitch, 1983 cel-vinyl copolymer on canvas Hand signed verso and further inscribed with title, date, size and PTG 751 67 x 110 1/2in. Framed 69 x 112in. Bears remnants of old gallery label to reverse. Ronald Ron Davis (born 1937) is an American painter whose work is associated with geometric abstraction, abstract illusionism, lyrical abstraction, hard-edge painting, shaped canvas painting, color field painting, and 3D computer graphics. He is a veteran of nearly seventy solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions. Born in Santa Monica, California, he was raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1955–56 he attended the University of Wyoming. In 1959 at the age of 22 he became interested in painting. In 1960–64 he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Abstract expressionism, the prevailing artistic movement of the time, would have an influence on many of his future works. In 1962 he was a Yale-Norfolk Summer School Grantee. In 1963 his paintings became hard-edged, geometric and optical in style, and by 1964 his works were shown in important museums and galleries. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, 1965–71, and in Malibu, California, 1972–90. Since 1991 he has lived and worked in Arroyo Hondo on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico. Ronald Davis from the earliest days of his career had a significant impact on contemporary abstract painting of the mid-1960s. According to art critic Michael Fried: Ron Davis is a young California artist whose new paintings, recently shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, are among the most significant produced anywhere during the past few years, and place him, along with Frank Stella and Walter Darby Bannard, at the forefront of his generation. He had his first one-person exhibition at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965. Barbara Rose wrote an in depth essay about Davis' paintings of the 1960s in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of his Dodecagon Series in 1989 in Los Angeles. Among other observations she wrote: Davis saw a way to use Marcel Duchamp's perspective studies and transparent plane in The Large Glass for pictorial purposes. Instead of glass, he used fiberglass to create a surface that was equally transparent and detached from any illusion of reality. Because his colored pigments are mixed into a fluid resin and harden quickly, multiple layers of color may be applied without becoming muddy. his is essentially an inversion of Old Master layering and glazing except that color is applied behind rather than on top of the surface. Alone among his contemporaries, Davis was equally concerned with traditional problems of painting: space, scale, detail, color relationships and illusions as he was with the California emphasis on hi-tech craft and industrial materials. His work has some connection to the Light and Space art movement related to op art and minimalism. He was a contemporary of Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Ron Cooper...