Artist Ronald Davis at The Harwood Museum, Taos, NM in 2025 with his painting Three Panel, 1969.
Pigmented polyester resin and fiberglass, approximately 7 x 18 feet. Gift to the Museum by Charles Cowles
RONALD DAVIS
Geometrician, Abstract Illusionist
The late 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. Returning to painting in 2001, he made several new series including the PVC Hinges, Squares, and Diamonds; the PVC Shaped Series; and several new series of digital renderings, expanding his established 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 at Miami Basel, December, 2015
by DAVE HICKEY
“The figure-ground relationship between the painting and the wall was intensified when these paintings began to skew off the rectangle…”
•
I am content to become one with the cosmos. — Ron
In Memoriam
Internationally-known artist Ronald W. Davis passed away November 19, 2025 at home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico at the age of 88. Read more…
•
Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980 – Video interview for The Getty Center’s 2011 exhibition
“My work is comprised of aggressively decorative, meaningless, unidentified floating objects that pretend to be rational. Illusion is my vehicle. Opticality is paramount.”
•
Studio International interview
by ELIZABETH BUHE
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.
•



