Artist Ronald Davis at The Harwood Museum, Taos, with his painting Three Panel, 1969.
Pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, approximately 7 x 18 feet. Gift to the Museum by Charles Cowles
Artist RONALD DAVIS –
Geometrician,
Abstract Illusionist
Ronald Davis is a painter known since the early 1960s for his use of geometric abstraction, abstract illusionism, shaped canvas painting, and 3D computer graphics. Davis has numerous exhibitions to his name, and has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. In 2001, he made several new series including the PVC Hinges, Squares, and Diamonds; the PVC Shaped Series; several variations on digital renderings; and the Pixel Dust Series. In 2021, he began a new series of over fifty canvas and acrylic paintings, the circular Polar Series.
From the catalog accompanying the Untitled. Art Fair exhibition of artist Ronald Davis’s works at Miami Basel, December, 2015:
“The figure-ground relationship between the painting and the wall was intensified when these paintings began to skew off the rectangle. It was intensified further with Davis’ illusionary excavations into the center of the painting and into the ground supplied by the wall…This fiat allowed art to conquer the room…”
– Dave Hickey
2011 video interview at the studio for The Getty Center’s 2011 initiative and exhibition, Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980
“My work is comprised of aggressively decorative, meaningless, unidentified floating objects that pretend to be rational. Illusion is my vehicle. Opticality is paramount.… Even though I, like DuChamp, reintroduced perspective illusion – the illusions of objects into my paintings – the objects themselves remain abstract and non-referential.”
– Ronald Davis
Studio International interview
by ELIZABETH BUHE
“Two artists who use perspective in their work are Duchamp and Davis. I’m kind of proud of that.”
Davis talks about his art and how he started out in the 1960s, his friendship with Judy Chicago, playing chess with David Hockney and having a Scotch with Clement Greenberg.
Artist Ronald Davis is represented by
Artist Ronald Davis is represented by
