American
b. 1928, New Castle, Indiana
Lives and works in New York, New York

Robert Indiana, a preeminent figure in American art in the 1960s, has played a central role in the development of hard-edge painting and Pop Art. A self proclaimed American painter of signs, Indiana has created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history and the power of abstraction and language, thus establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre. He is particularly known for his Love prints and sculptures. A large sculptural version is located in the Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Indiana distinguished himself from his Pop peers by addressing important social and political issues and incorporating profound historical and literary references into his works. In 1964 Indiana accepted Philip Johnson’s invitation to design a new work for the New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, creating a 20-foot EAT sign composed of flashing lights, and collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film Eat, a silent portrait of Indiana eating a mushroom in his Manhattan studio.

1966 marked a turning point in Indiana’s career with the success of his LOVE image, a continuing theme central to his work. The image’s popularity importantly emphasizes its great resonance with large and diverse audiences and has become an icon of modern art. The universality of the subject, to which Indiana continues to return, is further evidenced by his translation of LOVE into AHAVA (Hebrew) and AMOR (Spanish).

In addition to being a painter and sculptor, Indiana has created a significant number of prints, among them the Numbers Portfolio (1968), as well as many other works of graphic art, including the poster for the opening of the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center (1964), and the poster for the opening exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art (1974). He designed the stage sets and costumes for the Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, which was presented in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and expanded in 1976 for the Santa Fe Opera in honor of the Bicentennial.

Robert Indiana’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his works are in the permanent collections of important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC; the Ablright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and many other major art museums around the world.

American
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Perry Ingli is a plein air artist who has worked primarily in pastels. His drawings grow out of a sudden perception of the striking beauty he may see or experience in a regional landscape. He is moved less by a subject’s physical reality than it’s underlying nature and surrounding environment such as moods of the season, weather, light and time of day.

His landscape paintings emerge out of revisits to regional sites, spread out year-by-year and created within series format. Each revisit allows for his artistic improvisations to be realized. Intuitive perceptions are aligned with his mastery of drawing and painting skills, to create the artworks in real time.

American
Lives and works in Minnetonka, Minnesota

Andy Iverson sources his drawn and doodled shapes as subject matter to create acrylic paintings with emblematic power. Some paintings allude to sculptural forms that one can imagine realized in outdoor public scale.

Regarding content, Iverson says, As you view my artwork I invite you to take it in one line, color, and shape at a time. Rather than strictly analyzing the purpose or message of my art, I want you to decide what it means to you: what it tells you coming from your background and viewpoint. In this way, you can have your own organic experience of self expression which makes you a part of my work. By doing this we have successfully collaborated in exercising the power of art.

American
b. May 15, 1930, Augusta, Georgia
Lives and works in New York, New York

Jasper Johns is one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. He ranks as one of the greatest printmakers of any era. In addition, he makes many drawings — unique works on paper, usually based on a painting he has previously painted. He has also created an unusual body of sculptural objects.

Johns' early mature work of the mid- to late 1950s helped to invent a new style that engendered a number of subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art. That new style has usually been understood to be coolly antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. While Johns' painting often extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism, his use of these techniques stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity.

The American flag subject is typical of Johns' use of quotidian imagery in the mid- to late 1950s. As he explained, the imagery derives from things the mind already knows, utterly familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled numbers, ale cans, and, slightly later, maps of the U.S.

As Johns became well known he began choosing images that he identified in interviews as things he had seen — for example, a pattern of flagstones he glimpsed on a wall while driving. Still later, he sourced details from famous works of art. He has included in most of his art certain marks and shapes that clearly display their derivation from factual, unimagined things in the world, including handprints and footprints, casts of parts of the body, or even stamps made from objects found in his studio.

Jasper Johns artworks are represented in every major museum throughout the world. His works are also in most discerning private contemporary art collections.

jasper-johns.org

American
b. 1949, Green Bay, Wisconsin
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

As a student Doug Johnson was primarily a painter but later focused on creative writing. Returning to visual work, he first concentrated on mixed media on paper and then color photography.

Johnson says, I enjoy the active nature of photography, the pleasures of the hunt for the image, as opposed to the "artist in his studio" scenario. Recent work involves cityscapes or street scenes revealing a fascination with the interplay of natural and artificial light, reflections, and the juxtaposition of structural and free-flowing elements. I love the way light bounces around inside a city.

Doug Johnson has recently been active exhibiting photographs of reflective atmospheric phenomena that are caught as a result of his day-and-night bicycle tours of the Twin Cities’ downtowns. His photographs are available in varied sizes. Some images can be printed in a larger format utilizing the dye-infused aluminum process.

See more of Doug’s work here

German and American
b. October 4, 1927, Stuttgart, Germany — d. March 15, 2020, Manhattan, New York
Lived and worked in Vermont and internationally

Wolf Kahn was known for paintings, drawings and prints that are formed from a unique blend of Realism and the formal discipline of Color Field painting. The fusion of color, spontaneity and representation has produced a rich and expressive body of work. 

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibits at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; and many others.

Japanese and American
b. 1951, Tokyo, Japan
Lives and works in New York, New York

Shirley Kaneda is a Japanese-American artist who was born in Tokyo to Korean-born parents where Korean, Japanese, and English were spoken in her childhood home. Earning her BFA at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, she has continued to live and work in New York.

Shirley Kaneda is an abstract painter. Her large oil paintings on canvas have been described as neon-hued, wavy and biomorphic. In discussing her own work, Kaneda once explained, "I think of myself as continuing the process of demystifying the ideation of values, such as the heroic, the aggressive, the optical, and the rational, that used to be associated with the masculine… I use my work to metaphorically promote such non-heroic themes as the decorative, beauty, fluidity, diversity, and so on.” Her works on handmade paper have a lushness about them.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Award, Shirley Kaneda exhibits in galleries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Kaneda has also been a contributing editor to BOMB magazine.

American, b. 1950 — d. 2017
Lived and worked in Bozeman, Montana

Terry Karson works with recycled materials such as cardboard, plastic packaging, bottle tops and other commercial packaging, transforming garbage into art. It’s kind of like alchemy, Karson says, referring to the pseudoscience that transforms matter. I take stuff that is thrown away and turn it into art. Karson has also created watercolor paintings on paper that mimic some assemblages.

Terry Karson’s work appears in many public and corporate collections. His museum shows include exhibitions at The Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, The Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana, The Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Great Falls, Montana, and The Walton Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

lkeeneart.com
American, Lives and Works in Charlotte, North Carolina

Linda Keene is a self-taught fiber artist based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been married 48 years, is the mother of one son and the grandmother of two amazing little boys. She enjoys travel, reading, genealogy, entertaining and spending quality time with family and friends.

Artist Statement

My artwork reflects images of African-American life and culture using colorful textiles as a medium. Each one-of-a-kind fabric collage is created using a combination of hand and machine quilting, as well as embellishments that enhance the overall image. My goal as an artist is to reflect the values of family, friendship and community that have shaped my world view.

Although I loved to draw and paint as a child, I did not grow up in an environment where that type of creativity was nurtured. So I chose to focus my energies on academic pursuits where I got lots of support and positive reinforcement. This path led me to get a Harvard M.B.A. and a successful career as a corporate marketing executive for over 25 years. My “Second Act” was as a non-profit CEO, where I spent 8 years leading one of the largest Girl Scout Councils in the United States before retiring in October 2015.

During my working years, I found many outlets for my creativity — like sewing, interior design, cake decorating, photography, quilting and scrapbooking — but never pursued them as more than hobbies. It is only in recent years that I have begun exploring my early passion for art in a more serious way.

Since I have always loved working with fabrics, it was easy to decide that was the medium I wanted to create in. It was a lot harder to figure out how to translate the designs in my head into fabric images. With practice, I began to find my artistic voice and produce work that I want to share with others. I have finally arrived at a place where I am ready for my “Third Act” as an artist.

I hope to create work that people will want to have in their homes because of the positive feelings that it generates. The characters in my images are always smiling, and I would like to see those smiles reflected when people experience my work.

I am excited about the possibilities that are starting to come my way as a result of sharing my artwork and I invite you to join me on this journey!

American
b. 1923, Newburgh, New York —
d. 2015, Spencertown, New York
Lived and worked in Spencertown, New York

Ellsworth Kelly first rose to critical acclaim in the 1950s with his bright, multi-paneled and largely monochromatic canvases. One of the first artists to create irregularly shaped canvases, Kelly maintained a persistent focus on the dynamic relationships between shape, form and color.

Kelly’s works are intended for viewers to experience with instinctive, physical responses to the structure, color, and surrounding space. His works also encourage a kind of silent encounter, or bodily participation by the viewer with the artwork, presented usually as wall-mounted, anomalously shaped panels in bold and contrasting colors that are free of gestural brushstrokes or recognizable imagery.

Ellsworth Kelly had his first retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1973. His work has since been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kelly's work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His works have earned international acclaim as well among both major museums and art collectors. 

Swiss
b. December 18, 1879, Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland —
d. June 29, 1940, Locarno, Switzerland

Childhood
Paul Klee was born to a German father who taught music at the Berne-Hofwil teacher's college and a Swiss mother trained as a professional singer. Encouraged by his musical parents, he took up violin at age seven. His other hobbies, drawing and writing poems, were not fostered in the same way. Despite his parents' wishes that he pursue a musical career, Klee decided he would have more success in the visual arts, a field in which he could create rather than just perform.

Early Training
Klee's academic training focused mostly on his drawing skills. He studied in a private studio for two years before joining the studio of German symbolist Franz von Stuck in 1900. During his studies in Munich, he met Lily Stumpf, a pianist, and the couple married in 1906. Lily's work as a piano instructor supported Klee's early years as an artist, even after the birth of their son, Felix, in 1907.

Klee remained isolated from the developments of modern art until 1911, when he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter. He participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912 and saw there the work of other avant-garde artists such as Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Klee visited Delaunay's studio in Paris that same year. His experiments with abstraction began at about this time.

Klee's trip to Tunisia in 1914 changed his relationship with color. "Color and I are one," he declared in his diaries. "I am a painter." Traveling with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, he drew and painted watercolor landscapes of Tunis, Hammamet, and Kairouan. After Klee's return, he created several abstract works based on his Tunisian watercolors.

Mature Period
Klee's views on abstract art were influenced by Wilhelm Worringer's thesis Abstraction and Empathy (1907), which hypothesized that abstract art was created in a time of war. World War I broke out only three months after Klee had returned from Tunisia. Klee was called to duty in 1916, but was spared the front. Meanwhile, he enjoyed financial success, especially after a large exhibition in Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Klee was reserved in his opinions against the war, but when a communist government was declared in Munich in November 1918, he enthusiastically accepted a position on the Executive Committee of Revolutionary Artists. The November Revolution failed soon thereafter and Klee returned to Switzerland.

Klee accepted an invitation to teach at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. The Bauhaus was an influential school of architecture and industrial design that aimed to provide students with a grounding in all of the visual arts. Klee taught at the school for ten years, moving with the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. He taught workshops in book binding and painting stained glass, but his influence as a teacher was most noted in his series of detailed lectures on visual form (Bildnerische Formlehre).

In 1930 Klee left the Bauhaus for the art academy in Düsseldorf, but this brief period of calm ended on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Klee was denounced as a "Galician Jew" and a "cultural Bolshevik," and his work derided as "subversive" and "insane." His house in Dessau was searched, and in April 1933 he was dismissed from his teaching position. Klee and his wife returned to Berne in December.

Late Period and Death
Two years after returning to Switzerland, Klee fell ill with a disease that would later be diagnosed as progressive scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that hardens the skin and other organs. The artist created only 25 works the year after he fell ill, but his creativity resurged in 1937 and increased to a record 1,253 works in 1939. His late works dealt with the grief, pain, resilience, and acceptance of approaching death.

Several of Klee's works were included in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition staged by the National Socialists in Munich in 1937. The accusations against Klee's character and politics that had been waged against him in Germany complicated his application for Swiss citizenship in 1939. While he had been born in Switzerland, his father was German, which according to Swiss law meant that Klee was a German citizen. Klee died on June 29, 1940 in Locarno, Switzerland, before his final application could be approved.

The Legacy of Paul Klee
Klee's artistic legacy has been immense, even if many of his successors have not referenced his work openly as an apparent source or influence. During his lifetime, the Surrealists found Klee's seemingly random juxtaposition of text, abstract signs, and reductive symbols suggestive of the way the mind in dream state recombines disparate objects of everyday and thus brings forth new insights into how the unconscious wields power even over waking reality.

In European art after the 1940s, artists such as Jean Dubuffet continued to reference the art of children as a kind of untutored, expressive ideal. Klee's reputation grew considerably in the 1950s, by which time, for instance, the Abstract Expressionists could view his work in New York exhibitions. Klee's use of signs and symbols particularly interested the artists of the New York School, especially those interested in mythology, the unconscious, and primitivism (as well as the art of the self-trained and that of children). Klee's use of color as an expressive medium of human emotion in its own right also appealed to the Color Field painters, such as Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler. Finally, American artists maturing in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ellsworth Kelly owed a debt to Klee for his pioneering color theory during the Bauhaus period.

American
b. St. Paul, Minnesota
Lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina

Eric Knoche had a very bad attitude towards pottery as a child and young adult. Towards the end of his time at university he touched clay for the first time and after that could no long imagine doing anything else with his life. He subsequently worked for two years with ceramist Jeff Shapiro and for six months with Isezaki Jun, Living National Treasure, Bizen, Japan. In 2011 he discovered the Argentine tango and now splits his passions between clay work and dancing. In addition he enjoys playing Sheepshead, collecting pinball machines and checking the cloud formations for the face of Elvis. Eric lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Kristin.

My work is constructed mostly from minimally processed clay straight out of the ground. All of my work is wood fired and the surfaces are the result of the dynamic interaction of the materials, forms, placement in the kiln, and firing methods.

Here are some things that influence my work: languages, tools, human and animal anatomy, machine parts, architecture, math equations, small movements of facial muscles, uncertainty, the argentine tango, the spine, memory, perception, cloud formations, plants, gravity, running water, and songbirds.

828-337-2558
eric@ericknoche.com
ericknoche.com

Awards
2018 – Artist Fellowship, North Carolina State Arts Council
2017 – Purchase Award, Delhom Service League/Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC
2015 – Purchase Award, Delhom Service League/Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC
2015 – 1st Place, Carolinas Got Art, Elder Gallery, Charlotte, NC
2014 – Emerging Artist, Ceramics Monthly Magazine
2010 – Purchase Award, Delhom Service League/Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC
2009 – Emerging Artist, American Style Magazine
2008 – Regional Artist Project Grant, Asheville Area Arts Council, Asheville, NC
2008 – Japan-US Artist Exchange Grant, Asian Cultural Council, New York
2006 – Kiln God Scholarship, Laguna Clay Company, City of Industry, CA
2006 – Purchase Award, Concordia Continental Biennial, St Paul, MN

Collections
Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina
Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina
Laguna Clay Company, City of Industry, California
Mission Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina

American
Lives and works in Chaska, Minnesota

Richard Kochenash is a plein air artist whose oil paintings capture his surroundings with gestural impressionistic force.

shaykun.com
Israeli and American, b. 1974, Tel Aviv, Israel
Lives and works in New York, New York

Shay Kun is known for painting pristine natural settings that serve as backdrops for varied antics. Tear Drop is a fantastic series created by Kun, using oil on canvas to create oil paintings with the recurring theme of hyperrealistic raindrops and water. These paintings magically stimulate memories in the viewer.

Shay Kun’s works have been exhibited worldwide, including solo shows in Chicago, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Berlin, Germany and Tel Aviv, Israel. He has also exhibited in numerous group shows, including at the 51st Venice Biennale, the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, as well as other venues in New York, Sao Paolo, Brazil and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

American
b. 1949, Pasadena, California

“Robert Kushner is arguably the most significant decorative artist working today…Kushner’s art goes against the prevailing trend toward the anti- or nonaesthetic, which takes revenge on life. He chooses instead to affirm the wonder of existence.”
— Donald Kuspit, Artforum, Summer 2007

Robert Kushner‘s newest work presents some striking departures and some reiterations of themes that have been integral to his work for decades. The most visible introduction is a bold use of geometricized patterns that swirl through the backgrounds of his new floral compositions, echoing, amplifying and sometimes even undermining the rhythms of the more naturally drawn floral elements.

In some ways, this use of pattern refers back to some of his early experiments from the 1970s combining geometric pattern with floral and figurative elements. However, he now utilizes a full spectrum of color, gold, silver and patinated copper leaf and a fracturing of the patterns to create paintings that are both complex and exciting to decode. Robert Kushner has continually addressed controversial and often subversive issues involving the interaction of decoration and art and has been considered one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement. In this new body of work Robert Kushner’s paintings remain overtly beautiful and unapologetically opulent. His exotic and unique color sense has become even broader within this new series, the emotional range varies from somber and contemplative to exuberant and celebratory.

Robert Kushner’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe and Japan since 1975 when one of his paintings was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 1984, Robert Kushner was the subject of one-person exhibitions at both the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, and in 1987, a mid-career summary of his work was organized by the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art.

A monograph on Robert Kushner’s three decades of artistic work, entitled Gardens of Earthly Delights, with text by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy and Holland Cotter, was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1997. A compilation of Kushner’s recent paintings on Japanese screens as well as canvas, written by Michael Duncan, was published by Pomegranate in 2006.

In 2004, Robert Kushner installed two monumental mosaic murals, 4 Seasons Seasoned, at the 77th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station. In 2010, an 80 foot long marble mosaic, Welcome, was installed at the new Raleigh Durham International Airport in North Carolina.

Robert Kushner’s works are in the permanent collections of museums around the world: The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Tate Gallery, London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, The Denver Art Museum, Galleria degli Ufizzi, Florence, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, Museum Ludwig, St. Petersburg, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

robertkushnerstudio.com

American
b. 1941, Hammond, Indiana
Lives and works in Arizona, Vermont and Paris

Terence La Noue creates paintings with layers of fabric, gauze and acrylic paint, forming a lively melding of many different materials, symbols and colors. His extensive world travels serve as inspiration for works that are abstract mixtures of Western and non-Western traditions and histories. India, South America, Morocco, Mexico and Nepal have been favorite destinations.

La Noue's paintings often take years to complete. Julie Sasse, curator of contemporary art at the Tucson Museum of Art, has said that There's a deep sense of archaeology in the way that the works are layered.

Terence La Noue has artworks in numerous international museum collections including the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan, the Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney, Australia, and the Musee d'Art et Archeologie, Paris, France. Various American collections also own La Noue paintings, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

French, b. 1883, Paris, France — d. 1956, Paris, France

Marie Laurencin was a French artist and designer known for her Cubist paintings and sculpture. In primarily in a palette of muted tones in grey, pink and pastels, Laurencin’s delicate portraits focused on those of young women and animals. Known as one of the few female cubists, she was closely associated with French avant-gardists in the Section d’Or movement, such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia and others.

In works including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, Laurencin developed a unique approach to abstraction that often centered on the representation of female portraits and groups of women. Her work lies outside the bounds of Cubist norms in her pursuit of a specifically feminine aesthetic and her use of pastel colors and curvilinear forms.

Marie Laurencin’s paintings are in art museums throughout the world. In 1983, on the 100th anniversary of her birthday, the Musée Marie Laurencin opened in Nagano, Japan.

Vietnamese and French, b. 1921 — d. 2015

“An artist’s true wealth comes from the diversity of his creation”
– Lebadang

1921
Lê Bá Đảng (Lê, his surname, Bá, his middle name and Đảng, his given name) was born on 27 June 1921 at Bích La Đông, (in Quang Tri near Huê, the former imperial capital of Vietnam), into a family of fairly rich peasants. From 1950, Lebadang connected the syllables of his name when signing. This became his signature for all his works.

1921 – 1939
It was at Bich La Dông, his own village near Quang Tri in central Vietnam, that he completed his primary studies. However, as soon as he grew into adolescence he felt an urgent need to escape and travel to France. Still under age, he signed up with “Indigenous Manpower” (Main d’œuvre indigène, M.O.I) a branch of the French Ministry of Labour. His father was unable to cancel his recruitment application and, with nowhere to turn, was forced to see his son leave.

1940 – 1941
Recruited at Quang Tri on 16 October 1939, he boarded the boat at Tourane (present-day Dà Nang) on 3 February 1940 and disembarked 47 days later at Marseille on 20 March 1940 after an uncomfortable and testing journey. As soon as he arrived he and his comrades were put in the new prison of Baumettes. He was to be part of the force of “Indochinese workers” most of whom were forcibly recruited by the French state at the beginning of the Second World War, mainly to work in arms and munitions factories, replacing the French workers mobilized into the army.

This period has been described in a book which came out in 2009 by Pierre Daum (published in 2009 by Éditions Actes Sud) “Immigrés de force : les travailleurs indochinois en France, 1939-1952” (Forced immigrants: the Indochinese workers in France, 1939-1952). The book also inspired a documentary film directed by Lam Lê (released on 30 January 2013) “Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise” (Công Binh, the Lost Fighters of Viêt Nam). Both works mention Lebadang.

1941
After his time in the prison of Baumettes, he was sent to an arms factory at Saint-Nazaire. He was to stay in the camps for 14 months, from 19 June 1940 to 28 August 1941. After two attempts to escape he succeeded in joining his company in Camargue, where he worked with the group reintroducing rice culti- vation there. He returned to the “M.O.I.” camp from Marseille, where he thought he’d be in the free zone (although it was under Vichy since 10 July 1940), but, after an altercation with a French officer, he was sent to Lannemezan disciplinary camp in the “Hautes-Pyrénées”. Once more he managed to escape and reached Toulouse in the free zone. The artist rarely speaks of this period which he described as horrific; the only exception being made for Pierre Daum while doing research for his book.

1942 – 1948
Alone and without resources he survived for a time in wartime France, and enrolled for a course in painting given by M. Espinasse and sculpture lessons given by M. Manin at the “École des beaux-arts” (School of Fine Arts) in Toulouse. In the sculpture studio he made a very lifelike bust of one of his fellow-students and a bare female foot which already showed a sureness of design and a control of volume. There, he was to find the real France, the warmth of friendship, the solidarity and that French culture which had always fascinated him. It was at the “Toulouse École des beaux-arts” that he met Thérèse de Longueval who was to marry Professor Jacques Ruffié whose Academician’s sword was to be designed by Lebadang in 1991. His situation improved, and he started designing the notices for the “Opéra de Toulouse” (“Britannicus”), and other cultural and sportive events.

1948 – 1950
In June 1948 he gained his diploma and won a competition for designing advertisements. With this money, he travelled to Paris. Lebadang left for Paris, attracted to the city by its cultural effervescence. Those post-war years were a Bohemian period, in the Latin Quarter, the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche and the rue Mouffard which were the subjects of many paintings. He had a studio in the rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève where he painted one of his first self-portraits in oil, using a range of grey and blues on raw linen.

1950 – 1951
During the fifties Lebadang held his first exhibitions, in Paris and in the provinces, which were well received in the press.

Among the Vietnamese community in Paris he met Myshu, an Eurasian, born Micheline Nguyen Haï, on the 5 July 1929 in the Havre, who was to become his wife.

He drew from memory, in Indian ink, the portrait of his father who had died in Bich La Dông. After his departure in 1939, he never saw his father again. On 14 May the same year his son, Fabrice, nicknamed Touty, was born.

He completed some intimate paintings of women using a palette of browns and ochres over large flat coloured surfaces as in the work of the painter Nguyên Phan Chánh, but showing a greater dynamism and movement in the composition.

1952
The Galerie de l’Odéon in Paris held an exhibition with his work.

1953
In 1953, he completed a series of Indian ink drawings and washes, gathered in a booklet entitled “Parfums de tous temps” (Perfume of All Times) which evoked the nostalgia he felt for the countryside of his native land and for his childhood. From then on Lebadang was regularly showing his work at the Galerie de l’Odéon in Paris.

1954
From 1953 he began to draw cats using Indian ink illustrating the sonnet “Les chats” by Charles Baudelaire in his “Fleurs du Mal”.

During 1954 he used ink on paper to represent scenes from the Indochina War, in particular the battle of Diên Biên Phu which ended the war. This series was shown as an exhibition in 2014, in the Museum of Vietnamese History in Hànôi.

At this time, drawings in Indian ink, enhanced by watercolour, showed scenes of daily life in a fairly realistic style, something between a rough sketch and a life drawing, in particular they showed Paris, the quarter of Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève and the South of France, to Cannes, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Nice where he made regular visits.

1956
The “Galerie de l’Odéon” in Paris put on their third exhibition devoted to his work, which was also exhibited in the “Galerie Au Seuil Étroit” opposite Notre-Dame in Paris. This minuscule gallery, just next door to the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, founded by George Whitman, was lent him by Roger Maria at the time artistic director of the “Théâtre du Lucernaire”. He arranged it as an exhibition space. In particular, the gallery showed the paintings of the Viennese artist Hundertwasser. An embryo of collectors began to emerge around Roger Maria and become interested in the works of Lebadang.

M. Maestroni, at that time director of the “galerie Cézanne”, organized his first exhibition at Cannes. Fernand Dartigues, who followed the regional news for the weekly “Cannes-Nice-Midi” and the Parisian review “Arts” and who wrote several articles on Lebadang said that: “Le Ba Dang’s horses are born from movement and light”.

1957
The Galerie Cézanne at Cannes put on his second exhibition.

1958
In Paris, he discovered lithography in the Arts-Litho studio, and regularly attended the studios of Fernand Mourlot and Jacques Desjobert. He held his third exhibition at the Galerie Cézanne at Cannes, and gave an exhibition of his new works in the Galerie Au Seuil Étroit in Paris. In the same year, the Château de la Napoule near Cannes organized an exhibition of his works.

1960
In the following years, galleries in Paris and in the French provinces hosted numerous exhibitions (Galerie Pierre Hautot, rue du bac, Galerie Bonaparte, rue Bonaparte, Galerie Fontaine, avenue Victor Hugo, Galerie Minage in Montpellier). In the sixties, England (the Frost and Reed Gallery in London), Germany, Switzerland (Leandro Gallery at Lausanne) and Norway (Spektrum Gallery and the Lundt University at Bergen) welcomed his works, opening the way to the United States and interested collectors there. He had his last exhibition at the “Galerie Au Seuil Étroit” at Paris and new exhibition at the “Galerie Sources” at Aix-en-Provence. He published his first portfolio, “Lebadang”, with Éditions Au Seuil Étroit with text by Suzanne Tenand, including three colour lithographs on Velin Dambricourt and a copy with six gouaches and six coloured lithographs on pearly Japan paper. He had his last exhibition at the “Galerie Au Seuil Étroit” at Paris and new exhibition at the “Galerie Sources” at Aix-en-Provence.

1962
His work was shown for the first time in Germany at the Ina Fuchs Gallery of Düsseldorf.

1963
He held showings at the “Galerie Mignon-Massard” at Nantes and at the “Galerie Sources “at Aix-en-Provence.

1964
This was the year of “Huit chevaux” (Eight horses), his first portfolio done in relief, without colours nor ink, on the poems and calligraphy of Chou Ling who initiated his early research on the materials and techniques of printmaking. The portfolio was made on paper from the Richard-de-Bas mill with a sequel on pearly Japan paper. He also made oil paintings with « calligraphed » texts in Vietnamese, like signs fixed against an abstract and textured background. He would use the same form in the lithographs which he would make for “La nature prie sans paroles” (Nature Prays without Words) after a poem of Lao Tzu.

1965
Lebadang produced a large painting (120 x 700 cm) based on the Vietnam War, which is now housed permanently in the Collections of the Lebadang Foundation in Huê. It was the same year Lyndon Baines ordered aerial raids, unleashing operation “Rolling Thunder”, and authorized the use of Napalm.

1966
The Cincinnati Art Museum, in Ohio, produced the first exhibition dedicated to his work in the United States. In the same year he exhibited at the Newman Contemporary Art Gallery in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. He brought out his first lithographs at Lublin Graphics, an editor in Greenwich in Connecticut.

The paintings of these years focus on Vietnamese legends, in particular the legend of Tào-Quân or Ông Tao, the kitchen god or hearth genie. He used a palette of reds and blues. He also began to paint boats and horses. The latter were to become one of his favorite themes which he would modulate using several kinds of media and different materials.

1967
He finished a portfolio of lithographs “La nature prie sans paroles” (Nature Prays without Words) on a poem of Lao Tzu. Altogether there were 16 lithographs in colour published by Weston Publishing, with text by Madeleine Petit and printed on Arches paper by Guillard and Gourdon in Paris. Each lithograph was immediately preceded by a page of callichromy. The two pages were linked and related one to another in a ceaseless exchange.

Lebadang finished two paintings which were like a foundation or matrix of his future work. The background was divided into several surfaces or facets, clear or dark, a point or a line, a luminous point which seems to lead the gaze to a connection which separates and structures the picture. The background is textured with something fluid, then rubbed and wiped with a cloth. Above, the forms, drawn with light touches, look as though they are intertwined and appear to come out of the background. The first painting shows a tree under an orange moon, the second is a horse galloping through a twilit landscape. The palette is orange and red enhanced with white and yellow for the light colors and browns and black, with blue, for the dark colours.

For the first time, in the bottom right hand corner of the picture and above the signature, the artist placed a little colored rectangle, like the seal of an oriental print.

1970
This year was under the sign of the print. Lebadang brought out several portfolios of prints with some new and innovative techniques: relief engravings, embossing, etching on an embossed background, lithographs on doubled Japanese paper, lithographs and reliefs etc.

The print workshop of Bernard Rémusat in Mougins near Cannes became the experimental site for Lebadang’s prints. With patience, talent and an understanding of the results Lebadang sought, Bernard Rémusat did test after test on the old hand press. The dies for the relief engravings were often too hard and tore the paper. The work had to be recommenced until both men were satisfied, as mutual agreement between artist and printer was essential. The lithographs took up the artist’s themes: horses, flowers and boats, landscapes. Relief engravings were abstract landscapes which anticipated his important series “Espaces” (Spaces) in 1985.

Between 1970 and 1973, he completed a series of paintings “Paysage indomptable” (Indomitable Landscape) on the theme of the Vietnam War. The paintings are in black and white in the style of Chu Ta, but in a more heightened style, with the movements of the brush appearing like calligraphic signs, combining image and language with flashes of light, displacements of material, flows of colour, projections, with the paint erased representing abstract landscapes where the Hô Chi Minh trail is shown as a red line. War landscapes.

The artist sometimes arranges the landscapes as polyptyques with a predilection for a four-panel form. In these monochrome paintings, with the motif, the painted and empty areas, the seal and the signature contribute to the equilibrium of the composition.

1972
An exhibition at the Galerie Fontaine in Paris and a second exhibition devoted to his work at the Frost and Reed Gallery in London.

The monochrome black and white paintings of the “Paysage indomptable” series are sometimes traversed by ochre or yellow spots in large “sweeps” or by a red dot, a sharp point, a blue mark like a scratch and the red line, continuous or dotted, representing the Hô Chi Minh trail. In 1972, “Operation Linebacker II” had aimed at the destruction of the North Vietnamese infrastructure so as to force North Vietnam to negotiate and sign the Paris Peace Accord which took place on 27 January 1973.

The same year he completed a lithograph (56th notebook) on a poem of Paul Eluard “L’extase” (Ecstasy) for the book “Hommage à toi, France”, a collective work including 62 French-language poets from Charles d’Orléans to Pierre Emmanuel with illustrations by artists and a preface by the historian and art critic René Huyghe. Lebadang’s illustration is a “female landscape” between Odilon Redon and Hans Bellmer.

1973
During the negotiations on the Paris Peace Accord, he asked M. Lê Duc Tho, the chief negotiator with Henry Kissinger, to bring him back some debris from the B52s so that he could make painted sculptures, heads of horses, human profiles, hands, birds, symbols of peace.

The last paintings, in black and white, of the series “Paysage indomptable” (Indomitable Landscape) are accompanied by “calligraphed” texts in Vietnamese, as in his paintings of 1964. He started working on a new series of horses in armour with the bard of neckline and the breastplate as decorative elements. The palette is dominated by reds and black, with a very accentued drawing that gives a lot of volume. They are sculptures-paintings.

1974
In 1974, at the “ArtExpo” in New York, he met John “Jack” Solomon, the president of Circle Fine Art Corporation, who, at that time, directed several art galleries throughout the United States. Jack Solomon founded Circle Fine Art Corporation in 1964, which notably represented Victor Vasarely, Erté, Norman Rockwell and Yaacov Agam. For Lebadang, this led to a series of exceptional exhibitions all over the United States.

The Circle of Fine Arts has at its disposal two large print workshops in New York and Chicago, and one jewellery workshop at Scottdale in Arizona where Lebadang produced his artworks. To these sites he brought Bernard Rémusat, his faithful print expert with whom he ran all his print-making experiments.

He received a commission from the glassmaker Daum for three molten glass sculptures, one of which, “Le repos de l’étalon” (The resting stallion) was to be shown at the French Embassy in New York in 1980 as part of the exhibition “Pâte de verre – Sculpture”, with works by Paloma Picasso, Salvatore Dali, André Lhote and César. He completed “Ten Horses”, a portfolio of lithographs in quarto super royal. All the plates are engraved on stone, lithographed and embossed by the artist himself.

The writer, Georges Conchon, wrote a text on Lebadang which appeared in the Éditions d’Art G.R.G. In this he spoke of that special light in Lebadang’s paintings calling it “metamorphosis of the naked” referring to François-René de Chateaubriand and Louis de Fontanes where the subject itself, the boats, the horses, the suspended water, tropical nature, are like a “metamorphosis of light”.

“The junks and horses which fill the paintings of Lebadang make me think of “the little figures floating in air” which Chateaubriand described on a Greek vase showing the corpse of Hector dragged by the chariot of Achilles in which Fontanes taught him to recognize “a metamorphosis of the naked, through which the ancient Greeks liked to see the soul” (Georges Conchon).

He held showings at the Düsseldorf Art Fair in Germany and started a series of exhibitions with Circle Gallery throughout the United States, in New-York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

1975
He exhibited at the Art Fair in Cologne in Germany.

The fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. He departed immediately in search of his family which had been scattered in the camps. There, he provided financial assistance to the reconstruction of his village and planted trees in the area which had been ravaged by chemical weapons.

1976
He composed the portfolio “Fantaisies Suite” (Suite of Fantasies).

The end of the Vietnam War allowed him to return to a country that was still devastated.

He created a large abstract painting (220 x 800 cm) representing a large landcape between the mountains and the sky, in black and white, with a dominant of blue, to which he added three spots of red colour (a dot, a line, the seal) which with the signature underline the horizontal composition. This work, characterized by its tendency to abstraction and a greater freedom, may be considered the completion of the series “Paysage indomptable” (Indomitable Landscape), the format requiring large strokes and a fluidity of the medium.

In the same year, a large painting (114 x 648 cm), composed of four separated panels, continued the series of the portfolio “La Nature prie sans paroles” (Nature prays without words). Those four panels represent calligraphies against a background of mountainous landscapes which illustrates the history of Vietnam. The palette is predominantly red-orange with earthen colours and ochres, counterbalanced by yellows and blue.

1977
He worked on the portfolio “Fleurs Série” (Series of Flowers) and exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Hautot in Paris, large oil paintings representing sexualized orchids in strange-looking shapes displayed in a range of blue and purple. The subject of the vase and the twig appears in blue compositions.

1978
He designed the set and costumes of the opera “My Châu – Trong Thuy” by the Vietnamese composer Nguyên Thiên Dao under the musical direction of Marius Constant at the Opéra de Paris (Salle Favard), whose general director at that time was Rolf Liebermann. For Lebadang “a piece of scenery is not necessarily a static illustration of an opera sequence”. He seeks the mobility and the illusion of life on the stage in a minimalist set where the colours create a touch of life. The libretto recounts the Vietnamese legend of the Citadel of Cô Loa in the kingdom of Âu Lac and of Princess Trong Thuy’s tragic destiny.

“As in my painting, I search first for a general tone, to which is added a layer of colour, a layer of light. For “My Châu – Trong Thuy”, I wanted, above all, to create a unity between the music, the legend and the scene.” (Lebadang)

In the same year, he performed “Lebadangraphy”, a set of serigraphs using a “technique of gilding” that he developed in the studios of Circle Fine Art. He also achieved screens. In these serigraphs, the superimposing of the layers produces a unique silken material in which the thickness of the inking and the transparency and the opacity of the colours have been worked upon.

“I tried to achieve a sumptuousness of harmonies over the total surface of the plate by the optical vibration and the superimposing of the colors, not by their accumulation.” (Lebadang)

The paintings return to the same subjects with variations : flowers and twigs in a vase, moonscapes, landscapes with rowboats seen from above, trees in the storm with a limited palette and a more fluid material close to a wash. When he exhibited at the Contemporary Art Fair in Basel in Switzerland, from 14 to 19 June 1978, his friend Marcel Salinas, a painter and lithographer, wrote in the catalogue “A propos de fleurs” (About Flowers) :

“The recent series of prints reveal a new dimension of the lithographic texture and this invention is the result of the active research that Lebadang incessantly undertakes. In this way he developed a new technique of printing using two sheets of paper, one of them being transparent, whose open texture interacts with the printing of the sheet below and conveying to each the appearance of a piece of coloured embroidery.” (Marcel Salinas)

1979
Many personal exhibitions are organized by Circle Gallery in New-York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Denver. Paintings about the same subjects become increasingly abstract with a very dark palette dominated by blues and black.

1980
The death of his son deeply affected him and left him in a deep crisis. He created a grave of stainless steel whose surface reflects the surrounding nature, the trees and the sky. A mobile displaying the Yin and Yang symbol moves with the wind and flutes allow the air to pass through it. On the surface of the grave the artist has sculptured scenes from daily life. The grave is to be found at the Cimetière du Montparnasse (Montparnasse Cemetery) in Paris.

“By creating his grave, I let his soul hover in reflection where the sky and the clouds, the birds and the trees are brought to life, moving with the figurines that represent his life and making it perpetual like the Yin and Yang, the Void and the Full.” (Lebadang)

“shadows and reflections”, poem by Mireille Gansel :

on the grave of purest steel
the trees and all their seasons
the skies and all their variations
and on the moveless waters of the absence
the shades cut out in a dance of clarity
tears of rain in drops of light
white flowers
and grey ashes of the incense sticks
in the early morning
on the way to his studio
the old painter comes to the grave of his child
shadows and reflections
soul of his art

He exhibited at the Circle Gallery in Chicago and at the Clayton Art Gallery in Saint Louis, Missouri. In Germany, the Genner Gallery at Duisburg and the Wonderbank Gallery in Frankfort held exhibitions of his recent works. After having lived in France for more than forty years, he acquired French nationality.

1981
Lebadang started working on “La comédie humaine” (The Human Comedy) referring to the work of Honoré de Balzac and representing his own view of the human condition. This considerable group of works consists of drawings, watercolours, paintings, etchings, lithographs, collages and sculptures. It is made up of dreams and recollections, of images inspired by nature and landscapes of his country in which Lebadang places human figures and scenes of daily life. According to his writings, he narrates in his work the past, the present and the future, joy and sadness, the innocence of childhood, the ardor of youth and old age, a combination of serenity and anguish.

A series of exhibitions with Circle Gallery in Dallas, Los Angeles and Houston, at The Owl Gallery in San Francisco, at the Walton Street Gallery in Chicago and at the Gallery in the Square in Boston

The seal, at first a coloured square or rectangle, becomes a red square with three figures within it representing the family and from now on it appears in all of his works.

He realized wooden sculptures representing figures, the couple or the family (the father, the mother and the child). The sculptures have little depth and are performed in direct cut technique with hollows, holes and borings, full and void. They resemble paper cut outs, but in three dimensions. They are not meant to represent human anatomy or shape. They are silhouettes.

1982
Several exhibitions held by Circle Gallery in New York, Pittsburg, San Diego, San Jose and at Northbrook, Illinois. In the same year, Lebadang exhibited at the Carolyn Summers Gallery in New-Orleans, the Cherry Creek Gallery of Fine Art in Denver, the Old Olive Tree Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Pavilion Gallery in Portland, the Ludeke Gallery in Cincinnati and the Pioneer Square Gallery in Seattle.

1983
A series of exhibitions at the Circle Gallery in Chicago, San Diego and New-York. The Promenade Gallery of Woodland Hills in Los Angeles exhibited his recents works.

1984
In the studios of Circle Fine Art in Arizona he started creating his artist’s jewels, which he named “Art to Wear”, golden pieces of jewellery with pearls and precious stones that prefigure, in miniature, the “Espaces” (Spaces).

Another series of exhibitions with Circle Gallery in Houston, Northbrook (Illinois), San Francisco, San Jose and Miami as well as at the Pionner Square Gallery in Seattle, the Congress Square Gallery in Portland and the Gallery in the Square in Boston.

1985
He started on what was undoubtedly to be his major work, the series of “Espaces” (Spaces). There are works on paper combining various techniques by using collage and superimposition, mid way between sculptures and bas-relief, like a synthesis reaching beyond these two forms of expression. Lebadang uses paper made especially for him at the Moulin de Larroque (the Laroque Mill) at Couze, in Dordogne, a pure handmade rag paper extremely thick, which he tears up by hand and joins together in superimposed layers so as to obtain a landscape with “relief”, a landscape seen from the sky. The “Espaces” (Spaces) are monochrome, white or black. At that time he is interested in the aerial views of the geoglyphs of Nazca by the American photographer Marilyn Bridges. He sees in them a bond between man and the cosmos.

“And, looking closely at it, Lebadang’s work seems moon-like, silently lunar. Open spaces that one observes from height, where the hills and hollows of the terrain reminds us the « Terra Incognita » of the first explorers. As if this where the kingdom of spirits, the refuge of the memory of the dead. Upon first glance, a work where the eye sweeps across glacial and desert landscapes, where only an expanse of blue makes us suspect the presence of a lake or a glacier. Between the serenity and the silence before the storm Lebadang is becoming the architect of nature.” (François Nédellec, curator, museum of La Castre, Cannes)

“Lebadang is a wise man, and one who knows what is not made with time is neither retained by it. And so he makes, or rather reconstructs, landscapes and continents in the image of the models he assembles.” (François Nédellec)

Exhibitions with Circle Gallery in New-York, Chicago, New-Orleans, Pittsburg and Los Angeles, at the Cherry Creek Gallery of Fine Art of Denver and the Promenade Gallery of Woodland Hills in Los Angeles.

In the same year he began working on an extensive series of watercolours representing nudes in a landscape where the landscape becomes the body and the body, the landscape. The palette is blue with touches of red.

He created another large painting (100 x 1060), an abstract composition, a vast landscape seen from above which is crossed by a horizontal line that seems to link four entities resembling immersed territories with three dominant of colours : ochre-yellow for the left side, blue-green for the center and purple for the right side.

1986
A series of exhibitions with Circle Gallery in New-York, Northbrook, Chicago and San Francisco.

1987
A series of exhibitions with Circle Gallery in New-York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Saint Louis, New-Orleans and Seattle.

During the opening of an exhibition at New York’s Circle Gallery, Lebedang made the acquaintance of Marc Squarciafichi who was then living in Japan and already owned many of his art works. Marc Squarciafichi became Lebadang’s agent and introduced him to Japan where he welcomed him to his studio in Izumano-Shi near Osaka.

Exhibitions in Osaka, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya and Ashiya where he showcased an important set of relief engravings with embossed technique on paper, “Espaces” (Spaces) on paper with inserted relief engravings or etchings, which he included under the title “Au-delà du graphisme” (Beyond the Graphic).

1988
Exhibitions in the United States, Japan and Germany.

1989
In the United States he received the Prize of “The International Institute of Saint-Louis”, given by the city of Saint Louis. On 25 January 1989, it was awarded to him by Mrs Margie May, who, together with her husband, Mr Morton D. May, were the donors of the Max Beckmann collection of the Saint Louis Museum.

1990
He took part in the International “Art Fair of Tokyo” (International Tokyo Art Expo) and at the “Kyoto Art Expo”. A series of exhibitions took him to Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and Ashiya.

1991
He was commissioned to release the academician’s sword for Professor Jacques Ruffié in collaboration with the smelter Pascal Arthus-Bertrand. “Meanwhile, Dang’s reputation does not cease to grow. Considering his talent and our old complicity defying time I suggested to him to sculpt this sword.” (Jacques Ruffié)

He was nominated Honorary Citizen of “The City of New Orleans” on 13 April 1991. He organized a rural exhibition in his native village at Bích La Đông in order to honour the memory of his father and his ancestors.

1992
He was nominated “International Man of the Year” in Cambridge in England. Lebadang travelled to India, where he met his friend Ruby Palchoudhuri who introduced him to the painter, Paritosh Sen in Calcutta. Later, Lebadang invited him and Ruby to Cannes where they took part in the Festival of Avignon for “the Year of India”. These meetings led to his first exhibition in India, in 1996, at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Calcutta.

1993
The works he created in this and the following year are further variations of the series “Espaces” (Spaces) composed of black paper which the artist repainted in blue and white.

1994
In Paris on 16 June 1994 Lebadang was appointed “Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres” (Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature) by the French Minister of Culture, Jacques Toubon.

1995
Many exhibitions are organized in Germany at the Herburger Gallery in Saarbrücken and at the Ostendoff Gallery in Heidelberg.

The painted “Espaces” (Spaces) became mobiles painted on both sides and hung up. Their basic material consists of paper made more compact by collage, superimposition and the addition of sand. The shapes are cut out and painted with figures or hollow shapes. The colours range from blue to black always including a red dot or line.

1996
The Birla Academy of Art and Culture of Calcutta organized his first personal exhibition in India. The exhibition presented painted “Spaces”, structured paintings and relief engravings with embossed technique on paper. His friend Ruby Palchoudhuri and the painter Paritosh Sen wrote the preface for the catalogue.1997
A regular spectator at the Festival of Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, Lebadang discovered, while on an excursion, the quarries of the mediaeval village of Baux-de-Province, where the works of artists are projected onto limestone walls.

On the request of Anne Plécy, the director and co-founder of the “Carrière de Lumières” (Quarry of Lights) in the medieval village of Baux-de-Provence (formerly called “Cathédrale d’Images” where Jean Cocteau filmed scenes of the “Testament d’Orphée” and which was used for giant image projection), Lebadang created a huge “Espace” (Space) of 300 m² by more than 10m high in this natural environment and in the immense galleries excavated in the rock stratum of the “Val d’Enfer” (Hell’s Valley). The exhibition intitled “Espace Lebadang” (Space Lebadang) was exceptionally open to the public until 2002.

“The material used to create the works was composed by the artist, he attempted to integrate it as closely as possible into the substance of the quarry walls in order to preserve the magic of this unique place.”(extract from the catalogue)

Myshu Lebadang inserted the following text by Roger Caillois in the catalogue of the exhibition reflecting the mineral environment made of limestone that served Lebadang’s works as a precious box : “Writings in stone: structures of the world. The vision captured by the eye is always poor and uncertain. Imagination enriches and completes it, with the treasures of memory and of knowing, with all that experience, culture and history let it discern, without taking into account what imagination itself invents or dreams, if necessary.” (Roger Caillois, “L’Écriture des pierres”. Skira, 1970)

2002
Period of the “Yeux” (Eyes). Interlacing of lines, swirls, planets or expanded galaxies or images of the cosmos, eyes are traversed by a red line. Sometimes, they are circumscribed in a box, the edges of the box are the edges of the canvas..

After a journey to Angkor Vat, he began the “Bouddha” (Buddha) series, large portraits where Buddha’s face, with the eyes closed, seems to emerge from a silken and flecked material made by « dripping » and projections in light passes merging into each other. The dominant colour of the paintings is blue. Some are sepia brown on a white background. He was to continue this series until the period of the “Cosmic Family” (Cosmic Family) in 2010.

2003
After an interval of more than 40 years without any exhibitions in Paris, the Parisian Gallery VRG showed his recent works. Continuation of the “Bouddha” (Buddha) series with figures calligraphed as characters in a poem, who adopt once more the attitudes of the fi es of “La Comédie humaine” (The Human Comedy).

2004
He held a one-man show at the Bijutsu Sekai Gallery in Tokyo Mai Courtot held a personal exhibition of Lebadang at the Galerie Hoa Mai in Paris. The works exhibited were “Espaces” (Spaces) in the form of mobiles, painted on both sides and hung, the paintings being highly structured and characterized by a mixture of materials and of painting techniques. Hybrid works combining several characteristics ranging between sculpture and painting.

2005
Second presentation of his works at the Bijutsu Sekaï Gallery in Tokyo.

2006
Inauguration, in the presence of the artist, of the Fondation d’Art Lebadang (Lebadang Art Foundation) in Huê, Vietnam. The Foundation was established with the support of the authorities of the city of Huê and of the province of Thùa Thiên-Huê. It permanently keeps and exhibits more than 400 works by the artist representing more than 70 years of creative work.

During his stay in Huê, he created several sculptures representing Buddhas and figures made from wood from Vietnam and stainless steel. The empty spaces and the holes correspond to hollow figures. Certain sculptures are steles of figures engraved and sculpted as bas reliefs.

Lebadang practiced the art of paper-cutting, between void and full, which allows light to shine through like a shadow theatre. He illustrated a song-legend of the Hmong people, “L’aimée de la rivière noire” (The Beloved One of the Black River), published by the Editions Alternatives and translated by Mireille Gansel. The illustrations consist of people and animals cut from paper that reproduces patterns of Hmong textiles and represents scenes of daily life in the mountains of the north of Vietnam.

2007
Third exhibition at the Bijutsu Sekaï Gallery in Tokyo.

2008
He participated once more at the Huê Festival.

2009
Exhibition at the “Fondation d’Art Lebadang” (Lebadang Art Foundation) in Huế. The “Cosmic Family” series contains his latest works. Mainly oil on canvas in dominant of blue as well as diptychs representing the family and birth, with the omnipresent figure of Buddha. During another stay in Huê he continued his sculptural work. Back in Paris, he created vases of erotic forms in terracotta. Others represent the grain of rice that he considered to be a form of habitat.

2010
He participated at the Huê Festival. He returned to the Buddha figure with eyes closed and to that of the child with exceedingly large eyes, wide open. Certain dreamlike paintings are among the “Espaces” (Spaces) with open eyes that seem to hover between earth and sky, and with the face of Buddha in filigree.

In his last painting (a triptych of 130 x 291 cm) of the “Cosmic Family” serie, in red and yellow ochre with shades of brown, he returned to his initial palette in a more purified style consisting of dripping, projections and rubbings in a light material that vibrates and breathes.

2011
The National Museum of Vietnamese History in Hànôi organized a major exhibition of his works.

2012
On the occasion of the publication of the book “L’art de la découpe” (The Art of Paper Cutting) published in the Editions Alternatives (Gallimard), in which the artist is mentioned, two large cut outs were exhibited at the “Librairie du Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou” (Library of the National Centre of Art and Culture Georges Pompidou) in Paris.

2014
A stele in memory of the 20 000 Vietnamese workers requisitioned by France during the Second World War was inaugurated on 5 October 2014 at Salin-de-Giraud in the Camargue. The association M.O.I. (Mémorial pour les Ouvriers Indochinois – Memorial for the Indochinese Workers) was the project supervisor. The work realized following an original model by Lebadang, which reproduces in wired form the posture of the Vietnamese farmer walking to the rice fields, with a hoe in his hand. By employing the technique chosen for the stele, made up of flattened parts, it is not possible to represent the initial volume and the wired appearance of the original model Mme Shimizu, director of the Cernuschi Museum (Museum of the city of Paris for the Arts of Asia) contacted Lebadang regarding a possible donation.

2015
Lebadang passes away on 7 March 2015 in Paris, at the age of 94. The funeral ceremony took place under the dome of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Several ceremonies were to be held in Vietnam, in his native village Bich La Dông and at the Lebadang Art Foundation in Huế.

His wife Myshu Lebadang made a donation to the Cernuschi Museum notably an important set of works on paper reflecting the artist’s extensive research and technical innovations in the field of printmaking. The donation includes 33 prints, a portfolio of 17 lithographs, 2 watercolours and 2 paintings.

The documentary fi titled “Lê Bá Dang –Tù Bich La Dông dên Paris” (Lê Bá Dang – From Bich La Dông to Paris) directed by Dang Nhât Minh was screened in Huê and at the cinema “La Clef” in Paris on 19 September.

2016
The documentary film titled “Lê Bá Dang – Tù Bich La Dông dên Paris” (Lê Bá Dang – From Bich La Dông to Paris) directed by Dang Nhât Minh was screened at the Fukuoka International Film Festival 2016 in Japan. Myshu Lebedang returned to Hue for the Foundation’s tenth anniversary. From 2 November 2016 to 5 March 2017, twenty works by Lebadang were exhibited amongst the recent acquisitions of the Cernuschi Museum, highlighting the donation made by Myshu Lebadang to the museum’s collection.

2018
Publication of the book “Genesis”, a set of 46 drawings made in Indian ink in the 1960s represents the evolution of species according to Lebadang. In the 1960s, Lebadang made a set of 46 drawings in Indian ink, which he called “Genesis”. The assembly is a fold-out book (leporello). The format is almost square. There is no text. The front cover is lined in black cardboard and for the back stitched in silk. On the production of the book, 46 drawings have been reproduced. The assembly is faithful to the original. A bilingual text has been added. The cover and a sleeve have been redesigned. Book printed on white offset paper of 170 gr, limited to 200 copies and numbered from 1 to 200.

Genesis
This set of 46 drawings made in Indian ink in the 1960s represents the evolution of species according to Lebadang. We start from the protozoan form. It is followed by suspended amoebae, ordered like a Mendeleyev periodic classification table recalling certain “mental landscapes” by Henri Michaux or the “musical scores” by Pierrette Bloch who sublimates the contrast between black and white.

This evolution is neither linear nor progressive. It moves from the embryonic state of the first semi-animal and semi-organic forms towards more elaborate forms and, at times, returns to the molecular world or to earlier stages. Some drawings show animal metamorphoses as if there had been a shift from animal to human. 
A hybridization of bodies.

This organic “phylogeny” which passes through dance and movement — swirls of shapeless matter crossed by strong winds or shakings ; bacchanals, an orgiastic space where bodies mingle and burst — marks the different stages of procreation or sexuality.

The drawings of “Genesis” prefigure “La comédie humaine” (1981) in reference to the eponymous work of Honoré de Balzac, which represents the human condition according to Lebadang.

2019
On April 21, Myshu Lebadang inaugurated the “Lebadang Memory Space” at Kim Son near Huê in Vietnam. It is housed in a contemporary style building and was designed and built by the architect, Hô Viêt Vinh. Its shape evokes Lebadang’s “Espace”, and its multi-levelled terraced roof forms a stage where cultural activities and shows can take place before a superb panorama. The park is decorated with sculptures, the whole effect responding to Lebedang’s desire to reunite nature, humanity and art.

edwardlentsch.com
American, b. 1959
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Edward Lentsch is a well-established painter working in mixed media on canvas. Lentsch’s monumental sized works exhibit unique surfaces and refined textures while also reflecting a contemplative element of alchemy and spiritual introspection.

The spiritual overtones of Lentsch’s painting are captured by his titles, where he uses mystical images and esoteric subjects to inspire the imagination of his viewer.  His titles are compelling as he reaches for what he refers to as a dialog that redefines synectic reasoning… (a concept first coined by Buckminster Fuller — 20th century visionary inventor). Wikipedia contributor William Gordon describes synectics as: a problem solving approach that stimulates thought processes of which the subject is generally unaware.

Ed Lentsch paintings are represented in both private and corporate art collections nationally.

jamescleonard.com
American, b. 1949
Lives and works in San Francisco, California

James Leonard is one of California’s leading abstract expressionist painters. Working with an extended palette knife and acrylics on canvas, he creates bold horizontal and vertical strokes in strong colors in order to trigger the viewer’s emotions. This basic movement is complicated by the inventive layering of dropped, speckled and fragmented colors that create a sense of additional depth.

Leonard says, I’m pulling paint, layering one layer at a time, which creates a sense of history in the painting. It’s like looking at a fence post that’s been repainted over a period of time. You can see the different colors and layers.

Leonard’s paintings have ambient landscape qualities and can have thirty or forty layers in one painting. His final touch employs a technique he calls sgrafito — scraping lines through the upper layers, so the colors of the ground layers show through. The German painter Gerhard Richer has influenced his style, approach, and directness.

James Leonard’s paintings have been exhibited internationally. His works also reside in private and corporate art collections across the United States and Europe.

American, b. 1964, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Steven J. Levin is an artist trained in the atelier method similar to that of 19th century Paris; his oil paintings apply a traditional aesthetic to modern themes. Levin draws his influence from a variety of sources: the masters, photography, and the cinema He infuses his paintings with a classical ethos going back to Titian.

His figurative paintings convey beauty, ranging from scenes of dim billiard halls with studied figures leaning intently under pools of light as they contemplate the table, to the cool brilliance of an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum in which admirers of past masters become the works of art themselves. Something as prosaic as an office building’s revolving door can transcend the moment.

One series of still lifes, Books and Butterflies, earned the top award for a still life painting from the ARC Salon of 2016. In the collection, beautiful old books are juxtaposed with butterflies that flit around the arrangement or alight on the pages, creating a visual simile of delicate pages and butterfly wings.

Levin has exhibited widely and has taken part in significant group and solo shows in San Francisco, New York, London, Beijing and Barcelona. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes in national competitions including the American Society of Portrait Artists, the Art Renewal Center, American Artist Magazine, the Salmagundi Club, Oil Painters of America, and the American Artist’s Professional League.

American, b. 1923, NY, NY — d. 1997, NY, NY
Lived and worked in New York, Southhampton and Captiva Island, Florida

Roy Lichtenstein, a key figure in the Pop art movement of the 1960s and beyond, grounded his profoundly inventive career beginnings by borrowing images from comic books and advertisements in the early 1960s, and eventually encompassing those of everyday objects, artistic styles and art history itself. 

Noted for his use of deadpan humor, Lichtenstein used a rigorously manual process of perforated templates to replicate and often exaggerate the dot patterning commonly used in printing imagery. Known as Ben-Day dots, this patterning became a signature element of his style, which incorporated the look of mechanical reproduction into the fine-art world of painting. His image transformations typically included reducing the color palette to saturated primaries, eliminating incidental details, heightening contrasts, and emphasizing the pictorial clichés and graphic codes of commercially printed imagery.

Lichtenstein moved from those clichés of commercial print culture to the aesthetic clichés of high art. Parodying the autographic mark-making style of Abstract Expressionism, he produced representations of cartoon-like brushstrokes in both flat and sculptural artworks. Art history proved an enduringly rich field for Lichtenstein’s transformations with riffs on the styles of artists such as famous landscape Impressionist Claude Monet, early 20th century figurative Post-Impressionist Henri Matisse and Cubist Pablo Picasso.

Roy Lichtenstein works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Tate Modern in London. His works are collected internationally by both museums and individuals.

American, b. 1949
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Kauai, Hawaii

Tom Lieber is an abstract painter and printmaker. His large-scale abstractions are notable for their bold, natural colors and fluid marks placed against a layered, neutral background. Informed by nature and meditations, Lieber’s work reflects his efforts to channel his interior life onto the canvas.

Often a single brushstroke or gesture anchors Lieber’s paintings, allowing the underlying color fields and tonal variations to recede and advance across the ground. Calligraphic mark-making, the supple flow and arc of his line, and the dynamic rhythm of his abstract compositions are all signatures of Lieber’s style. He treats the act of painting as a full-body experience, open to unpredictable and challenging imagery.

The grace and shape of Lieber’s bold lines appear over subtle neutral backgrounds with pockets of dense color and movement. Lieber’s new, large canvases, thick with paint, can evoke a reference to Joan Mitchell in the foreground mark-making, at the same time the nuanced color variation in the backgrounds leave a suggestion of Mark Rothko. While these visual influences are present, the work and the energy that it emits can be no other than Tom Lieber. Often a single brushstroke or gesture anchors the painting, allowing the underlying color fields and tonal variations to recede and advance across the ground.

Lieber’s environments influence his works to an autobiographical degree despite the non representational quality of his work. Informed by nature and meditations, Lieber believes that the body can be better equipped for inventing than the mind, treating the act of painting as a full body experience.

Since the mid-1980s, Tom Lieber's work has been shown and celebrated internationally. Lieber’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Tate Gallery, London; and numerous other art museums.

marylingen.wordpress.com
American, b. 1959
Lives and works in Backus, Minnesota

Mary Lingen produces unique oil paintings whose landscape subjects are the results of her calm, walking in the woods and seeing the world around her, observing its physical changes and the way the light looks at certain times. In her paintings representation and abstraction coexist in the same work.

Lingen’s paintings are executed with thin, flat paint. Brushwork and texture are absent, because she feels they interfere with a clear reading of the shapes, lines and colors. Her focus is on the complexity within the landscape, and on connecting the parts into a whole. Each painting is a universe onto itself, with a distinct visual logic. Lingen employs systems of segmentation and her own manual pixilation to accomplish them.

Mary Lingen’s paintings are represented in numerous private and corporate art collections.

American, b. 1964
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

The common thread in studio artist and filmmaker Kristen Lowe’s work is her interest in natural spaces and the presence of a variety of inhabitants. Large-scale rich charcoal drawings express the spiritual and potential psychological power of grazing sheep. She has also created images of eagle’s nests by layering charcoal, natural grasses, collected field materials as well as authentic postage stamps dating back to the start of the 20th century. Lowe explores American mythology through two iconic images; America’s national bird and historical events as documented through the United States mail service.

A recent film project, Painting the Place Between is a feature length documentary about four contemporary abstract painters as they confront layers of conflict while taking their inspiration to paint the Midwest landscape.

Lowe’s drawings and film work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Paris. Her work is in private and public collections, including The Louvre Museum, Paris, where a video she co-directed is in their visual education collection.

hughmargerum.com
American, b. 1955
Lives and works in Santa Barbara, California

Hugh Margerum works with oil paint on canvas, paper, and monotypes. He creates abstract images that explore relationships of scale, figure and ground, and most of all color. They are abstract interpretations of things that happen in nature. He explains that Utilizing the romantic nature of oil paint, exploiting the qualities unique to the medium; the lush color and two-dimensional plasticity — I’m able to express feelings, thoughts, and impressions that have arisen as a result of my research in the field.

Hugh Margerum’s works are represented in many private and corporate art collections.

robertmathesonfineart.com
American, b. January 1, 1956
Lives and Works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Preserving the Landscape One Canvas at A Time

I spent my childhood traveling back and forth between the city and my uncle's farm in western Minnesota and our lake place not far from the farm. Spending so much time in the country helped to instill a great love of nature and an appreciation for the beauty and peacefulness of rural areas. Being adopted I struggled to find a way to fit in. Playing sports, scouts etc. but it was art that always called to me. I much preferred drawing to homework! I was a poor student, I think I was just bored. After the service I attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design part time for a year on the G.I. Bill. I began to wood-carve in the early 80's carving birds and fish learning how to paint them helped when I started to paint landscapes.

As luck would have it, my neighbor was Brian Stewart – a member of Plein Air Painters of America. Brian not only gave me a demonstration but also urged me to give it a try. This was a life changing event! I have been painting Plein Air ever since. I have attended a few workshops with Brian Stewart and with Stapleton Kearns. I painted on a regular basis with noted painter Bob Bonawitz and others who helped me become a better painter.Painting from life is the best teacher one can have. Kind of an old school guy, hardly ever use a camera relying on memory has been a blessing. I am convinced that in time the landscape will change so my motto is Preserving the landscape one canvas at a time I participate in gallery shows in the area on a regular basis. My work is collected nationally and I am known for my winter paintings.

I reside in Southwest Minneapolis with my wife Nancy and four dogs. My other passion is Jazz and I spend many hours listening to the greats. You can find me outside painting the creeks and farms year round. Just listen for the whistle of some jazz tune that is running through my head while painting away. I also have a page on Facebook where most of my newest works are posted. Please take a look and if you see one you like or have any questions I would love to hear from you. Thanks for taking time to visit my work.

French, b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France — d. 1954, Nice, France

Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the twentieth century. He sought to use color as the foundation for expressive, decorative, and often monumental paintings. As he once controversially wrote, he sought to create an art that would be a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair. Still life and the nude remained favorite subjects throughout his career. North Africa was also an important inspiration. Towards the end of his life, he made an important contribution to collage with a series of works using colorful cut-out paper shapes. He is also highly regarded as a sculptor.

Douglas Flanders has represented Matisse for nearly 40 years. We have sold countless prints, drawings and sculpture, many of which are coming back on the market. If interested please inquire for current availability.

kimmatthewsart.com
American
Lives and Works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Kim Matthews makes nonobjective drawings and sculpture in various media. The frequent use of accretion to develop her works evolved from practical concerns—the need to be productive with little available studio time—and spiritual ones, as repetition is evocative of the mantra meditation that structures her daily life. The recipient of a 2010-2011 Jerome Fiber Artist Project Grant, Ms. Matthews exhibits in nonprofit and commercial venues throughout the U.S. In 2017, she participated in her first international exhibition in Ukraine. Her work is featured in Lark Books’ 500 Paper Objects and Artistry in Fiber, Volume II: Sculpture, published by Schiffer.

Artist’s Statement
I’m interested in the ineffable qualities of “objectness” — what is sometimes called aura—as well as materiality and process as vehicles for spiritual engagement. My work is rooted in a long-term meditation practice; making drawings and sculptures is a complementary discipline of devotion. I use tactility to draw the viewer into the work and toward introspection through the seduction of intense looking.

Although the 108 Series drawings are comparatively quiet—a kind of art medicine—they have a kinship with the exuberant sculpture in this exhibition despite their origins in very different experiences. In addition to the obvious shared formal qualities of geometry, tactility, and evidence of the hand, each series is the product of a healing process spurred by profound loss. The drawings are influenced by the Tantric drawings of Rajasthan in their format, simplicity, and potential use for prayer or contemplation. They tend to emerge in response to current world events or personal ones; I’ve made them throughout the Australian wildfires, COVID, and the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, for instance, although they began in response to a breakup of a long-term relationship. They are not topical, however.

The sculptures are increasingly revealing themselves as analog to a soul-retrieval process. They were prompted by a desire to reclaim my most comforting childhood memories and express affection for the illustrators and designers whose work informed my early visual lexicon—Peter Max, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast—and the brightly colored design objects I yearned for: inflatable furniture, the Panasonic Toot a Loop radio, and Op-art prints. They are also influenced by the art of the 1960s and early 1970s; in particular, post-minimalist artist Eva Hesse is a touchstone, as she is for so many women.

See work from Kim’s Solo Exhibition Here

@joshmeillier
American, b. 1990, Northfield, Minnesota
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Josh Meillier completed his BFA in drawing and painting at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2013, and received his MFA in painting at Pratt Institute in 2020. He has exhibited solo and group exhibitions in New York, Minnesota, Washington, Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri and South Carolina. Some of his most recent shows have been NO LONGER A GAME at SEASON in Seattle Washington, Emergent Poise:Persona at On Canal in New York, New York, Contempo Tempo, at NE Sculpture in Minneapolis, Minnesota, inheritance, at Super Dutchess Gallery, in New York New York, Lately, at CIRCA Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and i dont understand this world, at Space369 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Josh Meillier’s paintings are driven by a prolific exploration in mark making, material and process. Using mixtures of paints, papers, tapes, glues, fabrics, flooring and old work he creates a process that is strategic, intuitive and adventurous. Materials are chosen through their accessibility and relationship to the studio, often times using byproducts of the creation process. This enables a certain amount of honesty in mark making and memory of painting.

French, b. 1923, Paris, France — d. 1986, Touquin, France

André Minaux was a drawer, lithographer of figures, still lifes and landscapes, engraver, illustrator and sculptor, His art flowed stylistically from New Realism to Impressionism, figurative and non-figurative painting, and geometric art.

His artworks have been collected internationally.

Spanish, b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain — d. 1983, Palm, Mallorca, Spain

Joan Miró developed as an artist from the Surrealist movement. He is known internationally for playful, abstract works that continued to carry the dream-like ambiance of Surrealism. His wide body of work includes drawings, paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture. Major projects include the 1958 ceramic murals The Sun and The Moon for the UNESCO building in Paris.

Joan Miró artworks are collected around the world. Many retrospectives of his works have taken place during his lifetime and after.

American, b. 1925, Chicago, Illinois — d. 1992, Paris, France

Joan Mitchell was a bold and inventive painter, and preeminent member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell painted striking, animated compositions, but remained somewhat separated from other Abstract Expressionist painters. Mitchell maintained that much of her work was inspired by her reactions to landscapes, rather than by internal emotion and the subconscious, often cited as a driving force behind the work of most Abstract Expressionists. 

Joan Mitchell had several retrospectives during her lifetime, at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at The Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as many others around the world. Her works are in most internationally prestigious art museum collections.

American, b. 1985
Lives and Works in Minneapolis, Minnesota
@mattmoberg

Matt Moberg is a self-taught artist based in Minneapolis. Matt’s journey into the world of art began as a means of staying alive. After years of struggling with addiction, Matt’s therapist suggested that when the cravings next come on, he should try art as a way of pushing back and saying no. Despite having little experience in the field, Matt heeded his therapist’s advice and found new life through doing so.

For Matt, art has been a lifeline in this way, a way to channel his emotions and cope with his challenges. His pieces are a raw and unfiltered reflection of his experiences, exploring the pain of addiction and the joy of rediscovering oneself in sobriety. Matt’s art is characterized by bold brushstrokes, sharp contrasts, and powerful imagery, inviting viewers to engage with their own emotions and experiences in a visceral way.

The story of Matt Moberg is a testament to the transformative power of art, and one that has cultivated a devoted following of collectors and art enthusiasts who appreciate his raw authenticity, talent, and the unique path that brought him to where he is. Today, Matt continues to create art that speaks to the human experience, exploring themes of identity, growth, and transformation through his charcoal drawings and paintings. He is hopeful for tomorrow, and believes that through the healing potential of artistic expression, we can all find the courage and strength to overcome our struggles and embrace the fullness of life.

French
b. November 14, 1840, Rue Laffitte, Paris, France —
d. December 5, 1926, Giverny, France

Claude Monet is an internationally known painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionism movement. Rejecting the traditional approach to landscape painting, Monet observed subtle variations of color and light caused by the hourly, daily and seasonal changes. His later, more abstract large-scale water lily paintings may arguably be considered precursors to the mid-twentieth century American Abstract Expressionist movement.

Claude Monet’s paintings are held in most every important art museum collections. They are still highly sought after at auction.

American
1967 – 1969: Bemidji State University, Bemidji, Minnesota
1973 – 1976: B.A. Art, B.A in History, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota, Graduated with Honors
1977 – 1978: Coronado School of Fine Art, Coronado, California

Exhibitions
March 2004: Flanders Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota
2002 – 2004: Flanders Gallery, Minneapolis - group
1998 – 2001: Anthony Kelley Gallery, Pensicola, Florida - group
May 1997: Robert Thomson Gallery, Minneapolis
January 1996: Bob Thomson Gallery, Minneapolis - group
October 1995: Central Lakes College Gallery, Brainerd, Minneosta
October 1994: Alumni Painters, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota - group
May 1994: Golden Era Show, Bob Thomson Gallery, Minneapolis - group
January 1993: Willmar Community College, Willmar, Minnesota
April 1992: Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis
October 1992: Galerie Simera – Signe, Maasricht, Netherlands - group
July 1990: Works on Paper, Thomas Barry Fine Arts - group
March 1990: Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis
January 1989: Steensland Gallery, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota
January 1989: 2D-3D , Minneapolis Institute of Arts - group
January 1988: Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis
July 1986: Recall from New York, Thomas Barry Fine Arts - group
February 1986: Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis - group
January 1984: White Columns Gallery, New York, New York -group
November 1983: Monoprint Show, Pillbury Center, Minneapolis - group
May 1983: Barry / Richard Gallery, Minneapolis
January 1982: Rochester Community College, Rochester
January 1982: Ten Minnesota Painters, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota - group
September 1981: Five Painters, Minneapolis Institute of Arts - group
April 1981: Minneapolis II, Daytons Gallery 12 - group
October 1981: Kiehle Gallery, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud
January 1981: Barry / Richard Gallery Minneapolis
April 1979: Minnetonka Juried Show, Minnetonka - group
February 1977: St. Cloud Artist Minneapolis Institute of Arts - group
March 1975: Alborg Institute of Art, Alborg, Denmark - group

British
b. July 30, 1898, Castleford, England —
d. August 31, 1986, Perry Green, England

Flanders has represented world-renowned abstract figurative sculptor Henry Moore and has worked with the Henry Moore Foundation for nearly 40 years. We have sold countless prints, drawings and sculptures. Many of these works are coming back on the market for resale.

Please inquire for current availability

Ojibwe - American, b. September 30, 1919, Chippewa City, Minnesota — d. April 17, 2000, Red Rock, Minnesota

George Morrison is known as a painter and sculptor of images and forms based on the landscape. His Native name was Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo (Standing In the Northern Lights). Abstract paintings of views of his beloved Lake Superior, puzzle-like wall reliefs constructed of driftwood, and later, more polished sculptural works are all signatures of Morrison’s artistic style.

An alumnus of the highly regarded Art Students League in New York, Morrison taught at many art institutions, both in Minnesota and on the East Coast, including the Minneapolis School of Art, Cornell University, Pennsylvania Sate University, the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio and the Rhode Island School of Design. He retired as a full professor from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Morrison’s work was exhibited at many well-known and prestigious museums during his lifetime, including The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; The Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of the American Indian in New York City; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

All works shown here are available unless otherwise noted
Please inquire for pricing and additional information

American, b. 1915, Aberdeen, Washington — d. 1991, Provincetown, Massachusetts

Robert Motherwell was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, active also as editor, writer and teacher. Influenced by the automatism put forth by Surrealism, Motherwell’s paintings are characterized by their impulsive, intuitive approach. He is perhaps best known for his iconic Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, where he painted over 150 variants of large black forms onto white backgrounds. His paintings, prints and collages are constructed of simple shapes, bold color contrasts and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brushstrokes.

Robert Motherwell has been exhibited and his works collected by most premier art museums around the world.

French
b. 1966, Garges-lès-Gonesse, France

Thierry Guetta, best known by his moniker Mr. Brainwash, is a French-born, Los Angeles-based street artist. According to the 2010 Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop, Guetta was a proprietor of a used clothing store, and amateur videographer who was first introduced to street art by his cousin, the street artist Invader, and who filmed street artists through the 2000s and became an artist in his own right in a matter of weeks after an off-hand suggestion from Banksy.

A number of critics have observed that his works strongly emulate the styles and concepts of Banksy, and have speculated that Guetta is an elaborate prank staged by Banksy, who may have created the works himself. Banksy insists on his official website, however, that Exit Through the Gift Shop is authentic and that Guetta is not part of a prank.

His work sold for five-figure sums at his self-financed debut exhibit Life Is Beautiful, due, it is thought,[who?] to a mixture of an overheated and hyped street art market and his endorsements from Banksy and Fairey. The exhibit was held in Los Angeles, California, on June 18, 2008, and was a popular success. In 2009, Madonna paid Guetta to design the cover art for her Celebration album.

In October 2013, Guetta took part in Art Wars at the Saatchi Gallery curated by Ben Moore. Guetta was issued with a stormtrooper helmet, which he transformed into a work of art. Proceeds went to the Missing Tom Fund set up by Ben Moore to find his brother Tom who has been missing for over ten years. The work was also shown on the Regents Park platform as part of Art Below Regents Park.

mrbrainwash.com

The bio above can be found HERE

Algerian, b. 1930 – d. 2020

Born in the 1930s in colonial Algeria to a Spanish father and a French mother, Muñoz now works in his Minneapolis studio, advancing his signature themes and constantly evolving his technique to increasingly greater achievement. His new paintings are natural outgrowths of work began in Mexico more than a decade ago, focusing on the theme of “apocalypse.”

For example, in Spirit and the Flesh (2002) and Monkey (2003–5), he uses the symbols of live animals and carcasses of meat to evoke the apocalypse theme. Muñoz’s carcass paintings bring to mind the imagery of twentieth-century Russian painter Chaim Soutine, whom Muñoz calls “a formidable painter.” Other great painters he reveres are Diego Velásquez, Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Mark Rothko. While it is tempting to invoke Francis Bacon, Muñoz says he does not feel close to the British painter.

His most recent paintings with an apocalypse theme are more abstract and even infused with some humor. They employ the repeating visual symbol of the rope net (“filet” in French, thus The Series of Filet), which links these works and provides a formal element to his compositions. Muñoz prefers to discuss his work in formal, technical terms, rather than belaboring its themes with “artspeak.” He talks about paint and canvas, line and shape, tools, brushwork, composition, and color. “First of all, what I am doing is making a painting,” he says, paraphrasing Willem de Kooning, whom he greatly admires.

How he makes a painting is innovative and visceral. Muñoz hangs huge canvases on a studio wall, approaches them carrying vats of thick acrylic paint, and wields strange brushes and tools that he makes of sisal threads, nylon rope, sticks, and twine. In effect, he paints his nets using the same materials that make up an actual net. He enjoys the smell of the paint and the fibers, and he loves the physical action of the brushstrokes that result in marks resembling hay.

In addition to the nets, other repeating forms in his most recent work on view include reproduced images of Giotto-like putti and a pink barnyard pig. They are what they are, and viewers are invited to bring their own interpretations.

American
Lives and works in Humeston, Iowa

Jim Murray’s abstract collages are constructed from layer upon layer of papers and other natural materials that are bonded together, sanded down, added to, then sanded again, sometimes to the point of perforation.

American, b. 1930, Chicago, Illinois — d. 2000, Danbury, Connecticut

Robert Natkin was one of the important abstract painters of his generation. Throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, he painted lyrical and powerful canvases. Natkin was not a formal purist, designer or architect of abstract compositions intended to stand strictly on their own without reference to other things, places, or events. He was a visual poet whose seemingly abstract images actually exist to enchant us with intimations and evocations of things we can sense but never quite see. His colors, shapes, textures, and lines are coaxed and cajoled toward their final destinations on his canvases.

Robert Natkin’s paintings are represented in outstanding private, corporate and art museum collections throughout the worldwide.

johnnewmanstudio.com
American, b. 1956
Lives and works in New York, New York

John Newman became known in the 1980’s as a sculptor and printmaker whose images came out of a resurgence of biomorphic abstraction. It models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms.

John Newman has had over 40 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He is represented in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery in London; and the Albertina in Vienna. He has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rome Prize, the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other organizations.

Oaxacan, b. 1936, Oaxaca, Mexico — d. 1985, Mexico City, Mexico

Rodolfo Nieto was an important painter of the Oaxacan School in Mexico. Noise and melody, the human figure and graphic line, expression and invention, reality and fiction are all interwoven in Nieto's canvases. He was part of the Generación de la Ruptura and has been related to the School of Oaxaca, with works based on the myths and legends of the state. Nieto worked in diverse techniques such as pencil, pastel, oil, mixed media and graphics. His work is semi-abstract within the realm of magical realism.

Rodolpho Nieto paintings and prints are represented in art collections internationally. Recent interest in collecting art by Latin American artists has stimulated the need for Nieto’s works.

American, b. 1924, Asheville, North Dakota — d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine
Lived and worked in Washington, DC, New York City, Vermont and Maine

As a student at Black Mountain College, Kenneth Noland met artist Helen Frankenthaler. Through her he became aware of Abstract Expressionism. This encounter was critical in the development of Noland’s artistic style; as he began experimenting with Frankenthaler’s pouring and staining techniques. This experimentation became the impetus for his own color field paintings.

Noland explored the relationships between contrasting or complementary colors; painted in thin yet opaque layers, each tone reveals its particular characteristic weight, density, and transparency. As a member of the hard-edged abstraction Color Field contingent, Noland was interested in removing all texture, gesture, and emotional content from his paintings. He even executed some works on shaped canvases that were filled by their compositions from edge to edge, leaving no marginal space for suggestions of depth or background.

Noland met the group of artists known as the Washington Color School Painters while teaching night classes at the noted Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in Washington DC. Clement Greenberg, influential art critic, early became a champion of his art. The late art critic of The New York Times Hilton Kramer wrote of Noland’s work, An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for color, of course — on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention, and provide the requisite pleasures… Mr. Noland is unquestionably a master.

Kenneth Noland was honored with retrospective exhibitions at both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and jointly at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC. His artworks are collected internationally.

housescanfly.com
b. 1947, American
Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Bruce Nygren is a Twin Cities-based painter and printmaker who brings the fantastical to his subject matter. In a solo exhibition catalog essayist Jon Zurn states that at a glance viewers often call Nygren’s work Surrealist, but Bruce prefers the word fantasy. While Surrealism has been preoccupied to paint a presumptuous landscape of the imagination, an arguably limited venture that tends to dead-end in societal angst and threadbare allegory, Nygren has, not surprisingly flipped the equation, plunking the imagination happily in the middle of the landscape.

Bruce Nygren says he juxtaposes unlikely elements and makes them seem natural. but in a dream-like way, creating a bit of mystery, too. Frequent subjects are old children’s toys.

Bruce Nygren has a strong exhibition record and dedicated collectors.

American, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin — d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Lived and worked in Chicago, New York City, West Texas and Taos, New Mexico

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of America’s greatest modernist painters, did not follow any specific artistic movement, but experimented with abstracting motifs from nature. She worked in series, synthesizing abstraction and realism to produce works that emphasized the primary forms of nature. While some of these works are highly detailed, in others, she stripped away what she considered the inessential to focus on shape and color. Through intense observation of nature, experimentation with scale, and nuanced use of line and color, O'Keeffe's art remained grounded in representation even while pushing at its limit.

O'Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico in 1929, settling permanently in Taos in 1946. She became enthralled with the mesas, Spanish architecture, wooden crucifixes, fauna, and desert terrain. These all became elements in some of her paintings. O'Keeffe did not go in for symbolism. I simply paint what I see, she is quoted as saying.

Georgia O’Keeffe has been exhibited many times in retrospectives at the world’s most prestigious art museums, most recently in 2016 at the Tate Modern, in London, England.

American and Swedish, b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden — d. July 18, 2022, New York, New York
Lived and worked in New York, California and Loire Valley, France

Perhaps the best-loved artist of the Pop Art movement, Claes Oldenburg is known for his playfully surreal sculptures that find new meaning in the everyday objects by expanding them to a gargantuan scale or deflating them into floppy, funny shells. A onetime journalist and illustrator in Chicago, Oldenburg fell in with Pop — a vernacular approach to art that mocked the somber bravado of Abstract Expressionism — after moving to New York in 1956.

Unlike fellow Pop artists Warhol and Lichtenstein, who took popular media as their inspiration, Oldenburg found his muse in everyday objects such as hamburgers, electric fans, bagels, and other familiar comforts. In 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store, an environmental installation populated with painted plaster objects that recreated the interior of an average New York City shop. Dripping, deliberately crude renditions of cash registers, dresses, men's hats, etc., broke down the distinction between commodities and artworks.

Oldenburg's environments sometimes doubled as the sites of Happenings, irreverent non-narrative theater pieces that defined the era's ad-hoc approach to art making and exerted a powerful influence on later performance art. A key figure in the Happenings, Oldenburg often sewed large canvas props for these performances.

In the 1970s, Oldenburg began collaborating on large-scale public sculptures with the art historian Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. Together, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created such iconic public artworks as Minneapolis' Spoonbridge and Cherry, a giant sculpture of a spoon balancing a ripe cherry; the monumental badminton Shuttlecocks landed on the grounds on both sides of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; and Cologne's Dropped Cone, a vanilla ice cream cone seemingly smooshed onto the corner of a shopping mall building. By manipulating the scale and context of ordinary objects, these mischievous public artworks transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary. 

A pillar of postwar art, Oldenburg has been collected by major museums around the world. His earlier drawings, prints and objects are highly collectable. Public scaled sculpture projects by him and Coosje van Bruggen continue to be realized.

Guatemalan, b. 1957, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Lives and works in Córdoba, Argentina

Luis González Palma studied architecture and cinematography and then turned to photography. He is of mixed Native or mestizo background, and his photography focuses on the plight of the indigenous Mayas and the mestizo people of Guatemala. His photographs are often meant to bring psychological and culture issues into the viewer’s mind. He incorporates distant gazes and mystical costumes that objectify and explain the pain these people, who are a minority in Guatemala, who have gone through the intense genocide of their race.

Symbolism is very important in González Palma’s work: he uses symbols to get his strong ideas across. He also uses sepia tints in his earlier photographs, and tends to leave the whites of the eyes not tinted, in order to intensify the subject’s gaze, bringing out the issues that the artist is trying to explain or explore.

Another strong part of González Palma’s photography is that he tends to collage his photographs, layering on top of his subjects with important words or symbols. He declares that he tries to portray the soul of a people in his photographs.

Luis González Palma has presented his work from 1989 until now in many exhibitions in America and Europe.

French, b. 1911, Marseille, France — d. 1994, Paris, France
Lived and worked in Paris, France

Max Papart's paintings and graphics are suffused with the sunny humor and bright colors of the French Riviera, where he was born. Working in a Cubist style, Max Papart depicted circus scenes, flirting couples, soaring birds, and similar cheerful subjects with flat, overlapping planes of contrasting colors and textures which suggest many levels of depth. Often he also achieves what has been called a time window effect, through which the viewer senses the past or future. This is not to say that Max Papart is simply a purveyor of superficial entertainment. For all their decorative gaiety, Papart artworks also force the viewer to think.

Max Papart is considered a master printmaker. Upon moving to Paris he learned the techniques of classic engraving. In 1960, he added to the this process the technique of etching with carborundum invented by his friend Henri Goetz.

Max Papart artworks are collected by distinguished art museums internationally.

joepaquet.com
American, b. 1962
Lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota and New York, New York

Joseph Paquet, while pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, had the good fortune of finding a mentor in John Foote who opened his eyes to the joys of drawing the human figure. After graduating, Joe met another major influence in his life, John Osborne, who was uniquely gifted in producing convincing landscape paintings from memory. Osborne believed a landscape painting should begin on location, but that its poetic essence should be completed in the solitude of the artist’s studio. Paquet experienced a demanding and rewarding apprenticeship, in which he learned to fuse field studies with the image he could see in his mind’s eye. To summarize this experience, he explains, “The intellectual process became married to the intuitive. Paint what you know well as what you see.” He goes on to expand the possibilities, “If I have the need or desire to move a mountain, adda figure or change the course of a river, I can do so. I am no longer shackled to nature. Now, I am painting my picture.” Paquet teaches and paints at Hurinenko and Paquet Studio in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He has been featured in an October 1995 article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, the May 2002 issue of The Artist Magazine, the March 2004 issue of American Artist and the July 2005 issue of Plein Air Magazine. Paquet’s recent awards include both Artists’ Choice and Collectors’ Choice from the 2007 Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational as well as the 2008 Alden Bryan Memorial Prize from the Salmagundi Club of New York and the First Place in Landscape from the Richeson 75: Artist’s Choice Competition.

Paquet is a Signature Member of the Plein Air Painters of America, The Salmagundi Club and an Out-of-State Artist Member of the California Art Club.

American, b. 1951 — d. 2020
Lived and worked in Catskill and New York, New York

Jonathan Phillips was a photographer and a painter of lushly textured images. Phillips painted in the 1980s and 1990s; landscapes, still lifes, and a series of ‘word’ paintings. After 2000, Jonathan was a writer, a photographer, a broker in real estate in New York City, and he created unique sculptural vases in his upstate courtyard, until he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in 2016.

Jonathan Phillips Obituary
Written by his wife, Ginnie Gardiner, March 4, 2020

On Wednesday, March 4, 2020, Jonathan Phillips passed away at the age of 67 after a heroic fight against cancer for 3 and a half years. He is survived by his wife of 42 years, Ginnie Gardiner. Jon W. Phillips was a “force of nature” in the Exon 20 Group, serving on the Exon 20 Council for more than 3 years and, working closely with other Council members to tame a very rare exon 20 gene mutation into a more manageable lung cancer. Jon co-chaired the Exon 20 Group’s Angel Buddies Program and advised patients from Australia to India, the Netherlands, and, across the U.S. on side effects, management, and other issues. Patients and their families loved him.

A scintillating and provocative writer, Jon pioneered journaling the patient experience for the Exon 20 Group, keeping a detailed patient diary and teaching others how to chronicle daily life fighting cancer. The board of directors of the International Cancer Advocacy Network (ICAN), sponsor of the Exon 20 Group, has named a special program in memory of Jon: The Jon W. Phillips Patient Journal Program, askican.org. Working with a team of six of the country’s top lung cancer specialists, Jon was the very definition of “proactive patient”; his passion was to assist other patients diagnosed with the same ever-challenging gene mutation.

Jonathan was also a passionate community leader in environmental protection. Here is a statement from the members of Keep it Greene: “If not for Jon, there would be no Keep It Greene. He was a principal founding member and Chair and he gave us our name. Jon was smart, sharp, funny, and full of rage against the rip-off artists operating against community interests. He combined his extensive news digestion skills with formidable recall to get on top of virtually any issue with which he chose to engage. And those issues could be remarkably diverse. His rage was coupled to a practical determination to push back. When Wheelabrator Industries quietly targeted Catskill to serve as home for a new toxic ash dump, Jon provided pivotal and early leadership to ensure that the ash dump was not approved. His research skills were used to gather vital information that informed the community about this environmental and health threat. ’Get your ash out of Catskill!’ was his Wheelabrator battle cry.

We have lost a leader, but we are grateful for the example he set of high purpose when protecting the environment and his community. “ Jon’s diverse background dramatically bridged the worlds of art, politics, business and real estate. Jon was working on a non-fiction manuscript spanning the 20th Century about the history of New York City’s largest luxury apartment building, the Belnord, where he grew up on the Upper West Side.

An artist with pieces on display at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Jon was the first artist-in-residence appointed by The Central Park Conservancy and Parks Department. He was also the founding Executive Director of “We Care About New York,” working for Marian S. Heiskel of the New York Times, Willard Butcher of Chase Bank, N.A., and Donald C. Platten, of Chemical Bank to formulate Clio Award-winning campaigns against litter and graffiti. Jon graduated from Riverdale Country School and received his B.F.A. at Cornell University, where he met Ginnie in 1970. They both graduated from Cornell in 1974 and in 1978 were married in New York City. They lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood from 1978 – 2004. In 2005 they moved into an historic Federal building in the Village of Catskill, New York, a community that inspired Jon’s activism and affection until his death.

Spanish, b. 1881, Málaga, Spain — d. 1973, Mougins, France

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Associated most with pioneering Cubism. He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as collage, printmaking and ceramics.

Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different styles — sometimes even in the same artwork.

Douglas Flanders represented the Picasso Estate for over 30 years. We have sold countless prints, ceramics. drawings and paintings. Many of the works are coming back up for resale. Please inquire regarding availability.

Spanish
b. 1931 — d. 2005

Joan Hernández Pijuan was one of the most celebrated Spanish artists of the last few decades. Pijuan is known for his simple compositions, neutral colors, and expressive lines. Born in Barcelona, Pijuan graduated from the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi. In 1953, he held his first exhibition, displaying expressionistic works. The Museo Municipal de Mataró hosted his first solo exhibition in 1955, and soon afterward, he co-foundered "Grupo Silex." The group, which included artists Carles Planell, Eduardo Alcoy, and Josep Maria Rovira Brull, explored the connection between Contemporary Art and primitive tradition, with particular emphasis on abstraction and Expressionism.

During the late 1950s, he lived and worked in Paris, where he learned etching and lithography, adapting a figurative geometric style. His works during this time incorporated mathematical elements and stacked, solid objects against gray backdrops. He didn't return to Informalismo until the 1980s.

In 1977, he began teaching at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi. In 1989, he was appointed a professor of painting in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, and became dean in 1992. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. In 2011, another retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow.

Pijuan died in Barcelona at the age of 74.

Timeline

1931
Born in Barcelona, Spain

1945 – 1947
School of arts Llotja, Barcelona, Spain

1952 – 1956
Studied at Saint Jordi Barcelona, Spain

1956
Prize of the national exhibition in Alicante; stays in Paris, studies at the 'Ecole des Beaux Arts' in Paris, works with etchings and lithographs

1957
Produces Action Paintings in black and white

1960
First Prize for painting of the 'Primer Salón de Jazz', Granollers/Barcelona

1964 – 1965
Zinklithogafie Series Barcelona, Spain

1966
Pijuan replaces his gesticular paintings by geometric and a precise way of painting

1971
The landscape as coloured space becomes a motive and source of inspiration

1976
Teaches at the 'Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Sant Jordi', Barcelona

1979
Professor at Saint Jordi Barcelona, Spain

1981
Figurative motives, which remind of flowers and plants

1985
Award of 'La Creu de Sant Jordi' by the General de Catalunya

1986 – 1987
Gives many lectures in art in Barcelona, Palmas, Gran Canaria

1988
Finishes his thesis 'Pintura i Espai: una experiencia personal' (Painting and Space: A Personal Experience) Faculty of Arts, University of Barcelona

1989
Professorship for painting at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Barcelona

1989
Wall paintings in the Pavillon Sant Jordi of the Olympic Stadium on the Montjuic on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Barcelona

1990
Becomes Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Barcelona

1992
Becomes Dean of the University Barcelona

1993
Wall painting for an auditorium of the Universidad Central, Barcelona

1995 – 1997
Membership of the Royal Academy of Arts, San Fernando, Madrid

1995 – 1997
Membership of the Royal Academy of Arts, San Fernando, Madrid

2000
Member of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

2005
Died in Barcelona on December 28

Exhibitions

2010
The Measurement of Time, the Course of Painting, Fundació Sunol, Barcelona, Spain (solo)

2009
Hommage à Joan Hernández Pijuan, Galerie Andres Thalmann, Zurich, Switzerland (solo)

2009
Escola Catalana del Tapís. El tapís contemporani català, Museu de Sant Cugat, Museo de Sant Cugat – Casa Aymat, Sant Cugat and Centre Cultural Caixa Terrassa, Terrassa

2009
Inmersiones. Paisaje de redes, sistemas, mallas y estructuras, II Bienal de Canarias, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

2008
España 1957-2007. L’arte spagnola da Picasso, Mirò e Tápies ai nostri giorni, Palazzo Sant'Elia, Palermo, Italy

2008
Joan Hernández Pijuan: La distancia del dibujo, Museo de Arte Abstracto Espanyol, Fundación Juan March, Cuenca (E), Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Fundación Juan March, Palma de Mallorca (solo)

2007
Mi Forma de Mirar, Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York, USA (solo)

2007
Hernández Pijuan. Granada 2004, drawings by Joan Hernández Pijuan and works by Elvira Maluquer, Juan Uslé, Arthur Danto and Dan Cameron, Instituto Cervantes, New York, USA

2005
Memoria del Sud, Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna, Vienna, Austria

2005
Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain (solo)

2005
Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York, NY (solo)

2005
From Picasso to Plensa: A Century of Art in Spain, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2005
Tornant a un Iloc conegut, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (Solo)

2005
48th Venice Biennale, Italy

2004
Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York, NY (solo)

2004
Galeria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy (solo)

2003
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Neuchatel, Switzerland (solo)

2003
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona (solo)

2003
Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (solo)

2003
Tornant a un Iloc conegut, MACBA, Museu d' Art de Barcelona, Barcelona (solo)

2003
Paper, Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York, NY

2002
Centre Cultural Contemporani Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (solo)

2002
Galerie Academia, Salzburg, Austria (solo)

2002
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Neue Bilder, BAUKUNST-GALERIE, Cologne, Germany (solo)

2002
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Obra Gráfica III (1991-2002), Fundación Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo, Marbella, Spain (solo)

2002
Joan Hernández Pijuan: recent work, Galerie Lutz und Thalmann, Zurich, Switzerland (solo)

2002
Caminar en l’espai, Sala d’art Josep Bages, Torre Muntadas, El Prat de Llobregat, Spain (solo)

2001
Galerie Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain (solo)

2001
Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain (solo)

2001
Ramis Barquet Gallery, New York, NY (solo)

2001
Galería Colón XVI, Bilbao, Spain (solo)

2000 – 2001
Galerie Xippas, Paris (solo)

2000
Rétrospective des Dessins 1972- 1999, Rupertinum, Museum für Moderne und Zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria

2000
Galerie Akademia Salzburg, Austria

2000
Joan Hernandez Pijuan, De Fariones Grabodos, Galeria Grafica, La Caja Negra, Madrid (solo)

2000
Obra Grafica, Museum für moderne und Zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria

2000
Galeria Soledad Lorenzo Madrid

2000
Rupertinum Salzburg, Austria

2000
Gallery Hanna Bekker Vom Rath, Frankfurt, Germany

1999
Gallery Hanna Bekker Vom Rath, Frankfurt, Germany

1998
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany

1998
Kunstverein Franke, Frankfurt, Germany

1996
Art Frankfurt, Gallery Bender, Frankfurt, Germany

1995
Gallery Soledad Lorenzo Madrid

1994
Gallery Bender, Munich, Germany

1993
Museo Rufino, Tamayo, Mexico

1990
Gallery Hanna Bekker vom Rath, Frankfurt, Germany

1988
Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

1985
Gallery Joan Prats, New York, NY

1979
Gallery Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain

1962
Marlborough Gallery, London

1961
Modern Art Museum, Galleria Spirale Arte, Milan, Italy

1961
Ateneo de Madrid Cercle de Belles Arts, Lérida, Spain

1960
XXX Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

1959
Vint anys de pintura espanyola, Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal

1958
Galería Syra, Barcelona, Spain

1956
Club 4 Vents, Paris

1955
Museo Municipal, Mataró, Spain

Literature

2010
Joan Hernández Pijuan. La mesura del temps, el transcurs de la pintura, Cat.: Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, with a text by Sergi Aguilar, Barcelona 2010

2009
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Obra Gráfica IV (2002-2005), ed. by Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, with a text by Pilar Vélez, Barcelona 2009

2008
Joan Hernández Pijuan: La Distancia del Dibujo, Cat.: Museo de Arte Abstracto Espaňol, Cuenca and Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma, ed. by Fundación Juan March, Madrid, with texts by Valenín Roma, Peter Dittmar and Narcís Comadira, Madrid 2008

2007
Iris de Pascua. Joan Hernández Pijuan, Cat.: Museo de Arte Abstracto Espaňol, Cuenca and Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma, ed. by Fundación Juan March, with a text by Elvira Maluquer, Madrid 2008

2007
Hernández Pijuan. Granada 2004, Cat.: Instituto Cervantes, with texts by Eduardo Lago, Juan Uslé and Dan Cameron, New York 2007

2006
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Mi Forma de Mirar, Cat.: Galeria Ramis Barquet, with texts by Simone Kuoni, Joan Hernández Pijuan and Arthur C. Danto, New York 2006

2004
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Œuvres Recentes, Cat.: Galerie Xippas, with a text by Maria de Corral, Paris 2004

2004
Joan Hernández Pijuan 1993-2004, Cat.: Carmen de la Fundación Rodriguez-Acosta, Centro Cultural Caja Granada Puerta Real, with texts by Fernando Martín Martín and Antonio García Bascón, Granada 2004

2004
Joan Hernández Pijuan. En la piedra, Cat.: Galería la Caja Negra, with poems by Aurora García and texts by Joan Hernández Pijuan, Madrid 2004

2003
Corral, Maria de / Maluquer, Elvira / Perez, Rafael Hernando: Joan Hernández Pijuan. Obra Sobre Papel, Madrid 2003

2002
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Volviendo a un lugar conocido, Cat.: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); Musée d’art et historie, Neuchâtel; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö; Galleria d’Arte Moderna de Bologna, with texts by Juan Manuel Bonet, Arthur C. Danto, Dan Cameron, Valentín Roma and María de Corral, Barcelona 2002

2002
Hernández Pijuan. Caminar en l’espai, Cat.: Sala d’art Josep Bages, Torre Muntadas, with a text by Dolors Juárez, El Part de Llobregat 2002

2002
Hernández Pijuan, Cat.: Pelaires, Centre Cultural Contemporani, with a text by Joan Hernández Pijuan, Palma de Mallorca 2000

2002
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Detrás de ciprés está la montaňa, Cat.: Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, with a text by Mariano Navarro, Madrid 2002

2002
Joan Henández Pijuan. Obra Gráfica III (1991-2002), Cat.: Fundación Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo, Marbella, ed. by Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, with a text by Rosa Vives, Barcelona 2002

2002
Pérez, Rafael Hernando, Casi un cuento, Madrid 2002

2002
Juárez, Dolors: Caminar en l'espai, Cat.: Sala d'Art Josep Bages – Torre Muntadas, El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona 2002

2001
Hernández Pijuan, Cat.: Galeria Joan Prats, with a text by Helena Tatay, Barcelona 2001

2001
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Œuvres Recentes, Cat.: Galerie Xippas, Paris 2001

2000
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Blanca, Cat.: Sala Verónicas, with texts by Mara Mira and Elvira Maluquer, Murcia 2000

2000
Hernández Pijuan, Cat.: Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, with a text by Joan Hernández Pijuan, Madrid 2000

2000
Joan Hernández Pijuan, Cat.: Galería Colón XVI, with texts by Simone Kuoni, Bilbao 2000

2000
Joan Hernández Pijuan. Œuvres récentes, Cat.: Galerie Xippas, Paris 2000

1998
'Sentiment de Paisatge 1972-1998', Galleria Credito Valtellinese, Refettorio delle Stelline, Milano, 18.6.–8.8.1998, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 28.11.1998–10.10.1999, Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona

French, b. 1830, Island of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands — d. 1903, Paris, France 

Camille Pissarro was a French landscape artist best known for his influence on Impressionist and Post-impressionist painting. While the Impressionists are known for their depictions of city streets and country leisure, Pissarro painted images of the day-to-day life of French peasants. His greatest work joins his fascination with rural subject matter with empirical study of nature under different conditions of light and atmosphere, deriving from intense study of French Realism.

The only painter to exhibit in all eight Impressionist salon exhibitions organized between 1874 and 1888, Camille Pissarro became a pivotal artist and mentor within the movement. He continually sought out younger, progressive artists as colleagues, and his articulation of scientific color theory in his later work would prove indispensable for the following generation of avant-garde painters.

Camille Pissarro is represented in every major Impressionist museum collection throughout the world.

jackson-pollock.org
American, b. 1912, Cody, WY — d. 1956, East Hampton, NY

Jackson Pollock developed one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art by detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space. He is the most well known artist of the uniquely American Abstract Expressionist movement.

With many of his paintings Pollock began with a linear framework of diluted black paint that in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors — lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. In each painting he maintained a balance between control and chance. Their coloring and sense of ground and space are sometimes strongly evocative of nature.

Jackson Pollock artwork is essential to the world’s best contemporary art museum collections.

joanportereinsman.com
American
Lives and Works in Minneapolis, Minnesota

In graduate school I pursued universal symbols and meanings of crisis-opportunity. I have continued to build on these ideas. Keywords describing my art are colorful, soul-searching, survival, gratitude, individuals, visualized emotions, and symbolic universal metaphors. Each drawing or painting has a story behind it.

Life-long learning and academics are of major importance to me. There is gratifying excitement in creating and transforming paper, canvas, or other surfaces into a one-of-a-kind work of art. I work in various media such as oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and mixed media. I paint with both hands as I work. I allow the art to take over. Sometimes my art has been described as Jungian. Carl Jung was a psychologist who believed that the soul was involved in creating. One of my favorite sayings by an unidentified person is as follows: "A craftsman works with his hands. An artisan works with his hands and his heart. An artist works with his hands, and his heart, and his soul."

My paintings and drawings are visual metaphors for personal experiences and synchronistic events. My visual language has developed from multiple influences: universal symbols – ancient to contemporary, historical and philosophical references, to psychology relationships from person to place. My art questions these connections with a strong emphasis on saturated color, line, shape, pattern and texture.

Education
1987 - MFA Studio Arts – Painting, Drawing: University of Minnesota
1983 - BFA Studio Arts – Painting, Drawing: University of Minnesota
1959 - BS Art Education – Speech-Communication Minor: University of Minnesota