Ronnie Landfield

Five Decades

January 13 - February 20, 2016

STUX + HALLER is pleased to announce the opening of Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades, a solo exhibition of paintings selected across the span of the artistʼs career, from the late 1960ʼs to his most recent work in 2015. Since 1969, Landfield has had more than seventy solo exhibitions of his paintings, including twenty-seven in New York City. His work was selected for two Whitney Annuals and the first Whitney Biennial, among innumerable group shows – including those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and at both the André Emmerich and Leo Castelli Gallery. The New Museum is currently including Landfield as part of its Bowery Artist Tribute.


Landfield began painting in 1962, at the tender age of 15. His style has grown gently and sometimes dramatically ever since, wrapping in many signature methods of layering soaring fields of color. Landfield was the youngest of the prestigious Color Field artists, and has been pushing his own boundaries since the heady days of the Bowery art insurgence of the late 60ʼs. The enduring vibrancy of Color Field painting, which is experiencing a revival of late within the international art world, remains evident over fifty years later in Landfieldʼs prolific and inventive work. From hard-line bands to vivid stains to veils of color fields, Landfieldʼs work always reflects his transforming insights on color and life. As the artist said in a recent interview, “I believe the most profound paintings allow people to look at the work and access the ability to see themselves.”


In the words of Louis Zona, Director and Chief Curator of the Butler Institute of American Art: “To stand in front of a Landfield painting is to be transported into world where color feeds upon color and every inch of the canvas is considered…Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America.”


Since 1969, Ronnie Landfield has had more than seventy solo exhibitions of his paintings. His work was selected for the first Whitney Biennial, amongst innumerable group shows, including those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and both the André Emmerich and Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1995 and 2001, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Painting. His paintings are represented in public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery, the Seattle Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Bavarian State Museum in Munich, the U.S. State Department, New York University, Stanford University, and many more.