American colorist Ronnie Landfield’s Structure and Color opens at Stephen Haller Gallery

NEW YORK, N.Y.- Ronnie Landfield: Structure and Color an exhibition of paintings by the renowned American colorist whose work is included in more than 40 museums and public collections at the Stephen Haller Gallery. Sept 8th through Oct 15th. During the nearly five decades of his career Ronnie Landfield has stayed true to his course as a painter of soaring veils of color. Louis Zona, Director of the Butler Institute of American Art, wrote: “To stand in front of a Landfield painting is to be transported into a world where color feeds upon color and every inch of the canvas is considered.”

Ronnie Landfield was the youngest of the youthquake generation of American artists of the 1960’s. He began his career at the Kansas City Art Institute at the age of 16. By 1969 his luminous paintings had already been exhibited in museum exhibitions such as the Whitney Annual (later Biennial). He had his first solo exhibition in New York at the David Whitney Gallery. That first exhibition sold out with four works going to major museums: MoMA, the Whitney, the Bavarian State Museum in Germany, and the Hirshhorn. Since then Landfield has had over 60 solo exhibitions around the world. The New Museum includes Ronnie Landfield as part of its Bowery Artist Tribute.

Landfield writes that his art is about the expression of transcendent, universal themes. He describes his tools as “color, space, and form.” Art critic Karen Wilkin wrote of Landfield’s paintings that they were: “first and foremost about the way someone in love with the liquidity and chromatic richness of paint moves his chosen medium across a canvas, but they also evoked idyllic landscapes—a vision of the Golden Age extrapolated, perhaps, from Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre and translated into pure color and gesture.”

In Art in America, critic Eleanor Heartney wrote of Landfield’s work: “Generally the light in these paintings seems to come from behind the colors, glowing through with flamelike intensity…Landfield is all light-filled joy.”

Again in the words of Zona: “Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America.”