LewAllen Galleries

Esteban Vicente, "Dream," 1996 Oil on canvas, 50 x 42 inches

Vicente was a renowned abstract painter who has long been celebrated for his elegant color combinations, bold scale, and ineffably lyrical compositions. Known as a central member of the first generation of the New York School abstract expressionists, Vicente created a vibrant body of work exceptional in its poetic colors and delicate shapes.

On View: Brian Rutenberg: Clear Seeing Space

April 28 - June 4.2017

Madison Cawein, Orchid Odyssey, 2014, 72 x 48 inches, oil on linen

Brian Rutenberg was born in South Carolina in 1965 and currently resides and works in New York City.  Nature forms the inspiration for his elegantly sumptuous abstract orchestrations of color, line and space.  His intention is to create what he calls “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking” and to express his own brimming sense of wonder in the experience of the beauty of the land. With rich color, densely painted surfaces, and vague references to elements of landscape, his paintings evince an aesthetically powerful conjunction between the intuitive and the seen, the felt and the observed.

His work has been described as “possessing” the landscape, evoking a sense of being in the midst of the woods rather than looking at a picture of one; and having the quality of participatory feeling rather than detached observation. He relishes the ambiguity of oblique suggestion in place of literal depiction and notes that “an eye not told what to see sees more.”  

Rutenberg’s paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of being in nature. Their extraordinary visual energy is fresh and vital and helps to convey “the idea that that painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.” In his work, he aspires for that experience to become more than momentary euphoric emotion and instead hopes that it can be an enduring source for nourishment of the soul and a reminder of the miraculousness of the natural world.  

Rutenberg is a graduate of the College of Charleston, South Carolina. He participated in his first group exhibition in 1985. He moved to New York and received a Master of Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts there. As a young and ambitious painter, he sought to capture a unique evocation of the landscape through abstraction. The base of his interest stems from growing up between Pawley’s Island and Charleston, where river and lake merge with ocean. His early childhood memories continue to be a presence in his painting.

In 1997, Rutenberg received a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland. He has also been the recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Studio Grant, the Basil Alkazzi Award, and various other awards and recognitions. He cites as artists whose work has been inspirational Neo-Expressionist Gregory Amenoff, as well as pivotal figures of Abstract Expressionist painting such as Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofman. His work is included in major public and private collections.

Click here to see available works by Brian Rutenberg at LewAllen Galleries

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Wolf Kahn immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Having completed his degree in only one year, Kahn was determined to become a professional artist. He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Traveling extensively, he has painted landscapes in Egypt, Greece, Hawaii, Italy, Kenya, Maine, Mexico, and New Mexico. He spends his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968. They have two daughters, Cecily and Melany. Cecily Kahn is also an artist, and is married to the painter David Kapp.

The unique blend of Realism and formal discipline of Color Field painting sets the work of Wolf Kahn apart. Kahn is an artist who embodies a synthesis of artistic traits – the modern abstract training of Hans Hofmann, the palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. 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, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

                                Click Here for Available Works

On Exhibit - Joe Ramiro Garcia: Optimist

Works on View / Exhibition Description

A highly regarded artist with a strong printmaking background, Garcia juxtaposes Pop Art's cultural iconography with an expressionistic, painterly aesthetic. There is a sense of the familiar within the figurative elements of his painting; the wordplay associations, the blurriness of past recollection and of late-night TV, his characters and cartoons sprung from both memory and the memorabilia of the past and the present. His technical approach relies on oils, brushes, scrapers, and a hand-applied lithographic technique that forms painted surfaces which operate in a middle ground between painting, lithograph, and collage.

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce Louis Newman as Director of Modernism

Artist Kurt Solmssen, whose paintings are currently on view at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, paints light-filled images of his life in Vaughn, Wash...

Blue Moon, Daniel Morper, 2006, oil on canvas, 34 x 46 in

In Memoriam - Daniel Morper: The Life of a Landscape Painter

On View 10.07.16 - 11.06.16

Daniel Morper (1944-2016) was a long-time resident and much beloved figure within the Santa Fe art world, as well as a nationally respected painter of the American landscape. As writers have noted, Morper delighted in painting everything from New York rooftops and street scenes, to Southwestern mountains and canyons, even volleyball courts on California beaches. In later years he became intrigued with railroad imagery--engines, boxcars, train tracks, and signal sheds framed in stoic relief against sylvan expanses of distant mountains.