Robert Natkins Abstract Paintings at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe

Written by Robert Natkin In Santa Fe Sunday, 03 July 2011 00:55

Santa Fe, NM.- LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, "Robert Natkin: The Architecture of Atmospheres". This large-scale survey of paintings and drawings traces the artistic evolution of Robert Natkin (1930-2010) —a salient figure in the history of Post-War American painting. Bringing together works created between 1972 and 1983, the exhibition represents five distinct series — suggesting their singularities, their congruities, and the points of transition between them. "The Architecture of Atmospheres" will be on view from June 10th through July 24th. In his authoritative text examining the art movements of the second half of the twentieth century, published by Phaidon and entitled Artoday, the eminent historian Edward Lucie-Smith describes Natkin’s work as ‘the ultimate development’ in that part of American Art Modernism that is referred to as Color Abstraction.”

Substantiating the author’s supposition, each of the works on view has extended the visual lexicon of a movement whose unique place in the history of visual culture is assured by its pioneering embrace of lush, unbroken surfaces and sensuous fields of color. Softly textured and subtly atmospheric, Natkin’s Intimate Lighting series was generated with the use of color-saturated sponges and rags lightly pressed against canvases to create a highly individuated analogue to pointillist composition. The series is among the artist’s most reductive, and the color variety in these works has the effect of interweaving to produce a unified color-light that appears to emanate from deep within the surface of the canvas.  Gently toned but jubilant, and forceful despite their nuance, these works evince the artist’s masterful capacity for expressive understatement.

Commenced on the occasion of a 1974 solo exhibition at the Holburne of Menstrie Museum in Bath, England, which was to be accompanied by a catalogue consisting solely of black and white reproductions, the artists’ Bath series transformed this restriction into the foundation for continued formal development. Resolving to paint in black and white, Natkin explored textural variations that would evoke the weathered walls of Bath’s ancient architecture. The artist’s Color Bath series, represented in this exhibition, manifests a gradual re-integration of muted coloration that further dynamize these works. Further evolution of the Color Bath series witnessed the artist organizing its gossamer textures into the distinctive, semi-fixed framework of curtain-like vertical folds that underpin the Bath Apollo series. Culminating in the boldly pigmented works of the Apollo series, the adoption of a simultaneously secure and dynamic compositional armature liberated Natkin from previous structural constraints—setting in motion an unmitigated attention to surface variations and chromatic interactions that would fully achieve the elusive conditions that the artist had termed “a visual vibrato.” Informed by the collision of the creative and quotidian, their rigorous compositional orders—impacted by profound spatial tensions and dramatic linearity—manifest the examination of Mies Van Der Rohe’s architectural contributions to the Chicago skyline.

Inspired by a 1977 visit to the Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland, the Bern series pays homage to Klee’s facility with formal dynamics. This small series of work re-engages with motifs explored in previous series—including vaguely referential squiggles, hatchings, blobs and ellipses co-opted from Native American and Persian artistic traditions—but fuses these semiotic undercurrents with a painstaking attention to image construction informed by Natkin’s extensive experimentation with process. This profoundly multivalent fusion of arcane symbolism and an accessible lyricism results in several of the artist’s most celebrated and sought-after compositions. Born in Chicago in 1930, Natkin encountered Abstract Expressionism in 1949 through an article in Life magazine. At that time a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved briefly in New York, where he would be deeply influenced by the paintings of Willem de Kooning. Returning to Chicago, he became closely associated with other Chicago artists—including his future wife, Judith Dolnick—and opened a gallery in which their work was exhibited in the late 1950s. These artists, including Natkin, were prominent in Chicago’s 1957 Momentum exhibition; and, in 1960, Natkin was included in the historic Young America exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. By the time of his passing in 2010, Natkin had earned a reputation as one of the nation’s leading color abstractionists.

Natkin’s artwork is an important component of numerous esteemed public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Le Centre Georges Pompidou.

LewAllen Galleries is one of the oldest and largest galleries of leading contemporary and modern art outside of New York City. Exhibiting in three locations, LewAllen is widely respected as one of the leading fine art venues in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the nation's second largest art market. Operating for more than 35 years on Palace Avenue near the New Mexico Museum of Art, the gallery maintains a robust show schedule each year in its 11,000 square feet of museum-like exhibition space. It has recently completed a stunning 14,000 square foot, architecturally forward new gallery building in the Santa Fe Railyard Arts District. LewAllen also operates a satellite gallery at the luxurious Encantado Resort by Auberge in Tesuque, north of the City of Santa Fe.


LewAllen Galleries is comprised of two vital divisions: the Contemporary Division that over its long history has earned a reputation both national and international for representing some of the nation's best-known living painters and sculptors, alongside leading-edge up-and-comers, and the Modern Division that curates and presents signal works from masters of American and European Modernism in accord with the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice. LewAllen is frequently cited by major collectors and curators as one of the finest galleries in the nation. Gallery exhibitions are often the subject of reviews and profile coverage in leading art magazines such as ARTnews, Art in America and Artforum as well as in local and regional publications.

The Contemporary Division features work in a variety of media and its artists represent many schools of contemporary art, including Realist, Pop, Abstract, Color Field, Minimalist, Op, Geometric Abstraction and Expressionist. Its internationally diverse roster includes such noted artists as Audrey Flack, Woody Gwyn, Judy Chicago, John Fincher, Emily Mason, Bernard Chaet, Robert Natkin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Forrest Moses, Hiroshi Yamano, Janet Fish, Ed Mieczkowski and Bill Barrett, among others. During its history, the gallery has also presented the work of such historically notable artists as Fritz Scholder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Colescott, Luis Jimenez, Ida Kohlmeyer, Thornton Dial, Donald Roller Wilson and Larry Rivers, among many others.

The Modern Division is fortunate to represent fine collections, museums, and individuals in assisting placement in the secondary market for American and European Modernist works of distinction and unusual quality. The Department employs professional art historical resources and prides itself on diligence regarding provenance and authentication as well as unusual levels of research, and curatorial attention dedicated to presenting museum-level exhibitions of signal works of the Modern era. Representative works of uncustomary importance to major international collections include those by such Modern masters as Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Pollock, Kline, Rothko and Modigliani, among numerous others.

More than 20 major solo and group exhibitions are staged in the gallery each year and often include informative lectures, artist talks, musical performances and other programs that complement the art on display. Major exhibitions are also accompanied by scholarly catalogues published by the gallery and including essays by leading international art critics and historians.

With collectors from around the world, the gallery utilizes state-of-the-art technology, the Internet and other forms of distance communication in helping clients build important collections. The gallery has a large following among corporations, public art spaces, museums and prominent private collectors in whose collections the works of its represented artists appear. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.lewallengalleries.com

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