Santa Monica, California, 1937 Ronald Davis Spent Most of His Youth in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After a Year and A

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Santa Monica, California, 1937 Ronald Davis Spent Most of His Youth in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After a Year and A

GEMINI G.E.L. AT JONI MOISANT WEYL Ronald Davis Born: Santa Monica, California, 1937 Ronald Davis spent most of his youth in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After a year and a half in the engineering program at the University of Wyoming, his diverse interests directed him toward several careers, including race car driving and radio announcing. In 1959 Davis entered the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated from there in 1964. At that time, Bay Area interest in abstract expressionism was high, and Davis' admiration for the expansive abstractions of Clyfford Still is evident in her early canvases. In 1965 Davis moved to Pasadena and had his first one-man show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles. In his monochromatic shaped canvases of this period, Davis examined issues of spatial illusion and two- dimensionality. Interested in drawing systems and new materials, he expressed his art ideas about paintings as objects, and in the late 1960's, sought a harder and smoother surface on which to develop them. Experimenting with plastics, he began working with resin and fiberglass, which offered great coloristic potential. By 1972 Davis adopted a rectangular format, using canvas and acrylic paints. By the end of the decade the artist was exploring computer-generated imagery. Davis currently maintains studios in Malibu and Hollywood. Apart from a few student experiments at Yale-Norfolk summer school, Davis made his first prints with Gemini in 1971. He has completed more than thirty-five editions there. He has also collaborated at Tyler Graphics Ltd. and has published several screenprints printed by Jeffrey Wasserman. The Pasadena Art Museum organized a one-man exhibition of Davis' work in 1971, and a major retrospective was held at the Oakland Museum in 1976. Shows have also been organized at Pepperdine University, Malibu (1979), and San Diego State University (1980). 535 WEST 24TH STREET – 3RD FLOOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10011-1140 212.249.3324 FAX 212.249.3354 [email protected] WWW.JONIWEYL.COM .

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Modernism 1 Modernism
Modernism 1 Modernism Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.[2] [3] [4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5] [6] [7] Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.[8] [9] In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 1959–1960, emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of introduced modernism and modernist theories to [10] harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.
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