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Email PageRon Linden 2007/2008
December 6, 2007- January 26, 2008
Reception: December 6, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Ron Linden
CUE Art Foundation
511 W 25th StCurated by Peter Plagens
“…his art remains very much “art,” with centric shapes and forms, a predominantly gray palette that rarely warms beyond rust and ochre, and a journeyman’s approach to drawing and paint application.”
Peter Plagens
Rife with diagrams and illusions of perception, Ron Linden’s paintings both mine and undermine the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionist and Conceptual art, as well as Modernist sculpture and design. This selection of 12 to 14 small- and medium- scale acrylic and graphite on wood and acrylic and graphite on canvas abstract paintings spans over thirty years of Linden’s career and features a range of signature imagery ─ biomorphic shapes, graphic elements, and schematically rendered items of furniture, books, and draftsman’s tools ─ that invite multiple readings.
The exhibition begins with a selection of paintings from the late 70s to 80s ─ a period in which uncluttered, monochrome works marked Linden’s wry investigations of two- and three- dimensional forms. Part of a series of depictions of isolated objects in empty spaces, in Mum’s Muteyness, 1977, for example, Linden questions the relationship of pictorial structure to “real” space by challenging perspective and contradicting perception through forms that appear to be both receding and advancing.
In Rubric, 2003, Linden slyly subverts select conventions of French decorative painting. Sweeping horizontal lines and splats of paint are applied to the background to create a grungy, staining effect mimicking what happens to scenic flats when they’re left lying on the shop floor. Adding to the sense of humorous doubt in Linden’s work, eyes, lips, and bodily orifices seem to burrow their way through many of his paintings on view.
The artist’s penchant for plotting surrogate maps from patterns comprised of mechanical and graphic elements flourishes in his most recent paintings, as exemplified by the ellipses and exclamation point featured in Phook, 2007. Linden strings together shapes the way the best writers choose words to create sentences that invite real contemplation.
Catalogue available.
ARTIST’S BIO:
Ron Linden received an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1965. In 1972, he gave up a tenured university teaching position in the Midwest to live and work in Los Angeles. Although he did teach as a visiting artist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA; University of California, Irvine, CA and elsewhere, Linden supported himself over the years as a scenic artist in Los Angeles film and television studios. He was one of the first artists — along with Bruce Nauman, Richard Jackson, Peter Plagens, Karen Carson and others — to establish a practice in Pasadena’s “Old Town,” and later pioneered studios in downtown Los Angeles’ Flower Market district and in the port district of San Pedro. For the past seven years, Linden has taught and run a gallery program at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington, CA, a community college with a largely working-class and minority student population. In his role as both Director and Curator at the Warschaw Gallery, he has also been instrumental in developing San Pedro’s recently thriving art scene. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2007) and the short-lived Storage Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2002) and participated in group exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA and the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA. The exhibition at CUE Art Foundation marks Linden’s first solo show in New York.
This exhibition sponsored by: Accademia Charitable Foundation, Ltd.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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