RONALD DAVIS, The Paintings: 1960s through 2010

October 17 – November 17, 2023

Reception: Thursday, October 19, 2023, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM

CHELSEA LOCATION
526 West 26th Street, Suite 209

David Richard Gallery, LLC
P: (212) 882-1705
www.davidrichardgallery.com

Private viewings are available by appointment, please call or email the gallery to schedule.

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Ronald Davis, The Paintings: 1960s through 2010, an exhibition surveying the optically stimulating and perceptually challenging paintings spanning six decades of the artist’s career that were produced in his California and New Mexico studios. Davis explored many new and unconventional painting supports and media throughout his career, including acrylic on canvas; molded polyester resin and fiberglass; acrylic and dry pigment on canvas; Cel-Vinyl acrylic copolymer and Nova Gel on Birch plywood; encaustic wax and pigment on birch plywood; and acrylics on expanded PVC plastic.

This presentation includes 27 geometric, hard-edge, and color-based abstract paintings created from 1963 to 2010. They mostly have shaped perimeters with some rectangular canvases that in the aggregate map Davis’s career-spanning investigations of illusory space and optical effects in the two-dimensional picture plane. His explorations began with the early 1960s paintings and series of minimalist Monochrome paintings from 1965; to his very well-known large scale, shaped, and molded resin paintings of slabs, dodecagons, and cubes (1966-1972); then to the perspectival Snapline (1975 – 1978) and geometric Floater (1978 – 1979) series, both acrylic paint on canvas; the Slabette series (1982 – 1985) and Ray Trace paintings (1982 – 1989); on to the Wax Series of encaustic paintings on wood (1996 – 1999); then on to the Hinge Series (2001 – 2002) and NuShape series (2002 – 2010); and finally, a return to the Shaped Paintings (2009 – 2010).

Fourteen of the artworks will be installed and hung on the gallery walls and the rest included in the exhibition catalog with a detailed checklist. A digital exhibition catalog includes an essay by Dave Hickey from 2015, Ronald Davis is Not Doing What You’re Seeing (Courtesy of the Dave Hickey Estate).