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

Ronald Davis at The Harwood Museum, Taos, with newly acquired painting, Three Panel 1969 (p0154)

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.

Essay by Dave Hickey - Ronald Davis is not doing what you're seeing

by DAVE HICKEY
From the catalog accompanying the Untitled. Art Fair exhibition 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…”

Deep I-Beam

FEATURED:
CUT OUT SERIES

Rarely shown and rarely seen, Davis’s flexible resin paintings of the 1970-1971 Cut Out Series epitomize illusionary, hard-edge shaped painting and Davis’s signature incandescent color choices.

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.”

Ronald Davis, age 85

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.

Ronald Davis in the studio, 2010
Artist Ronald Davis is represented by
Artist Ronald Davis is represented by
203 Fine Art, Taos, NM - logo

Charlotte Jackson
Fine Art

Santa Fe, NM

203 Fine Art, Taos, NM - logo

Charlotte Jackson
Fine Art

Santa Fe, NM