Want more images or videos?

Request additional images or videos from the seller

1 of 5

Ron Thomas
Tropic Exotica
c. 1970s

About the Item

Ron W. Thomas (1943-2009) "Tropic Exotica" c. 1970s Oil on Canvas 50 x 50 inches Signed Lower Right and Verso Ron Thomas’ Take if from Me and Kim Krause’s The Eleusinian Mysteries ran concurrently at The Carnegie and Marta Hewett Gallery, offering a nice opportunity for a symposium (at least in writing) of two very different types of abstraction. I provide a bit more coverage for Thomas’ work simply because, to my knowledge, it hasn’t been written about before. Krause’s work has been written about before, and very well, leaving me less to add. Take if from Me, Ron Thomas Take if from Me is the first retrospective of Ron Thomas’ work, and a very impressive one. It’s also Matt Distel’s first major exhibition at The Carnegie since becoming Exhibition Director. If this show is a harbinger for the quality of shows to follow, we have something to be excited about. Thomas died in 2009, relatively unknown. This unfortunate obscurity tempts us to approach his art from an “outsider art” perspective, and Distel makes those connections to the work. I fault no one for using the pejorative term because even MOMA – our grand arbiter of art – uses it. But the distinction between “outsider art”, “self taught” or “visionary”, and academically or officially sanctioned art only obfuscates the fluid and rich history of women and men making artful objects. Our endless taxonomies tend to do that, although they are supposedly useful to academics, to what end I can’t tell (as an aside, compare the banal term “outsider art” with the much more eloquent and lively French equivalent, art brut, further confirmation to me that the French may be worse than us at everything except living life, an inconsequential matter for some). Nevertheless, even accepting the “outsider art” dichotomy, I’d still argue that based on Thomas’ work the term isn’t fitting. Formally, Thomas’ paintings fall within the difficult history of geometric abstraction. Geometric abstraction got its start a few decades before Thomas’ 1943 birth with Malevich’s constructivism and suprematism, idealistically seeking the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling”, a rather grand endeavor. It quickly lost its high art luster when embodied in design by the German Bauhaus school, which sought to use the purity of geometric forms in everyday design to propel the modernist canon (progress, idealism, utopias, those sorts sentiments unpopular today). The interplay between high-art geometric abstraction and design begins but doesn’t end there. Later, American artists like Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella re-explored constructivist forms to get at the essence of a subject through absolute reduction of form and materials. Design and corporate culture again followed, with everything from minimalist advertising (alla VW’s “Think Small” campaign) to the use of geometry and repetition to convince consumers to buy things they didn’t even know existed. Geometric abstraction has repeatedly oscillated between high art, on one hand, and design, advertising and even propaganda on the other. It became the go-to motif for more than one South American dictator. Thomas was trained at the University of Cincinnati DAAP with a degree in Advertising Design. He worked for some of the same large corporate ad agencies that extolled geometric forms and repetition as models to, simply put, get people to want things they never really needed. He would have been aware of geometric abstraction’s oscillation between high art and institutionalized advertising design. In fact, I think he’s making subtle reference to the interplay in his work. Much of it has a tight repetition that echoes the repetitive pulse of advertising in our graceless media. Certain paintings, particularly the ones composed with the help of randomness, take the form of a scrambled television screen, a light-night post-advertising (post-apocalyptic?) world. If this reference is intentional, it’s a very astute nod to art history and design. Not the stuff that “outsider art” is typically made of, unless outsider art is simply any art made by anyone who lacks an MFA. Thomas’ work is wide ranging and, in postmodernist tradition, draws on numerous and diverse references. Aside from geometric abstraction it invokes op art, pueblo indian patterns, Navajo rugs, the French surfaces/supports movement, Hindu and Buddhist Mandalas, Pink Floyd album covers, minimalist music, Tantric imagery and Islamic art. He made photo collages with family pictures that have Mandala-esque centers and quadrants. He used shaped canvases ranging from triangles to nonagons. His palette varied from pastels to bold cadmiums. Despite this diversity, the work isn’t of an abrasive, postmodern diasporic quality. Some paintings are symmetrical with a very certain center, while the composition of others is determined by chance. All have in common a balanced geometry, meticulous precision, repetition and tightness that at first impression belies the mystical aspects that, according to the exhibition catalogue, Thomas openly expected of his work. The Mandala and Tantric imagery we see in Thomas’ Change and Alpha Redux, among others, is Thomas’ most obvious foray into the mystic. But as soon as we start recognizing the mandala form as a Mandala in the historical sense (which is to say recognize it semiotically, as a sign or with language), we in part destroy its effect as a vehicle for achieving a higher state of consciousness. It becomes intellectualized, if you will. A subtler (and, for me, more effective) invocation of mysticism is Thomas’ use of randomness to compose paintings. In Flags of all Nations he rolled die to randomly choose from a group of predetermined shapes and colors. Chance has been used before in the history of abstraction (what hasn’t?). But for reasons different than Thomas’. Ellsworth Kelly used chance in his 1951 Colors for a Large Wall, where he randomly determined colors with the idea that he could place himself and painting as a whole outside of what he saw as the limits of subjectivity. Gerhard Richter has been using chance off and on for the last 40 years, the most notable his 4900 Colors from 2007. Richter’s objectives are always murky, being the painter of doubt and irony, the master of plurality of expression, and not exactly forthcoming, but it seems his 4900 Colors is simply about the pure joy of finding form in randomly applied bright colors. Thomas, on the other hand, used chance with the paradoxical purpose of appealing to chaos to create harmony. As a way to “open chaos, so that magic arises”, to quote Carl Jung. Jung was drawing from Jewish mysticism and the Lurianic Kabbalah notion that “original chaos” (i.e. the chaos that ensued before the world was created) is the source for true creativity. Chaos theory in modern art arguably begins with John Cage who, along with his successors Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, was criticized in part for minimalist music’s correlation with the repetitive pulse of advertising used to create inauthentic desires (compare Thomas’ use of repetition discussed above). Unfortunately we probably will never know whether Thomas was closing his circle (or Mandala) by reference to (i) geometric abstraction’s relation to advertising design, (ii) to chaos, chance and minimalist music, and (iii) back to the repetition of advertising. We won’t know because he’s now dead and his art didn’t get the attention it deserved when he was alive. I’ll let the reader delve more deeply into these rather interesting issues at his or her leisure, hopefully after seeing Thomas’ retrospective, which I highly recommend.

Creator:
Ron Thomas (1943 - 2009)
Creation Year:
c. 1970s
Dimensions:
Height: 50 in (127 cm)Width: 50 in (127 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
American Modern
Period:
Late 20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Missouri, MO
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU74734820302

Julius NjauUntitled, 1987

$5,000

H 29 in W 38 in D 1.25 in

Untitled

Located in San Francisco, CA

Artist: Julius Njau – Tanzanian (1961- ) Title: Untitled Year: 1987 Medium: Acrylic on Canvas Sight size: 27.5 x 36.5 inches. Framed size: 29 x 38 inches Signature: Signed, dated lower right Condition: Very good Frame: Framed in original frame. Frame in fair condition This colorful painting of figures is by the well-known Tanzanian artist Julius Njau. It is in very good condition and signed “Julius N” and dated 1987 in the lower right. The frame is simple unfinished wood. It has a few small scratches Tanzanian artist Julius Njau was born in 1961 Marangu, Moshi in Tanzania. He attended the Primary School Kilimanja. In 1972, a serious fracture of the leg caused him to spend two years in hospital where he began to paint and his career as an artist commenced. Julius was encouraged by a Finnish radiology specialist who supplied him with material and purchased his works. She also organized his first exhibition in Finland in 1983. The first works of Njau are very representative, inspired by the nature and the traditional aspects of his country. In 1984 his technique changed and his style transformed. Julius Njau paintings are characterised by the interaction of primary colors and the mixture of forms. Julius Njau's artworks works are part of the collection of Osaka Prefecture and Toyama Museum of Modern Art in Japan. They are also in the Frankfurt Museum of Ethnology (fur Volkerkunde), in the ZAK Gallery (Zeitgenossische afrikanische Kunst), Furth in Germany, in the Amos Anderson Helsinki Gallery, Finland, and in the 5th British Museum in England. In 2002, Julius Njau received a Nagoya City Hall Award and in 2003 the Grand Prize at the Toyama Prefecture International Competition at the "Sukiyaki Encounter the World" Poster Design Festival. Julius Njau is President and a founding member of the Marafiki group. EXHIBITIONS 1983 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki, Finland 1984 'Group Exhibition' Gallery of Denmark 1985 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Danish Volunteer Training Centre, Tanzania 1985 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Tynset, Norway 1985 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Gallery of Sweden 1986 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Danish Volunteer Training Centre, Tanzania 1987 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1988 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Vogue Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya 1988 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Centre culturel francais, Nairobi, Kenya 1989 'Julius Njau One Man Show' National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya 1990 'Into the Nineties' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1990 'Portraits of Kenya' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1991 'Gallery Artists' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1991 'The Custodian's View' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1991 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Nairobi Safari Club, Kenya 1991 'Julius Njau One Man Show' Nagoya City Network Centre, Nagoya, Japan 1991 'Julius Njau One Man Show' National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya 1991 'Julius Njau One Man Show' The German Culture Centers, Goethe Institut, Nairobi, Kenya 1992 'Julius Njau One Man Show' International Gallery, Madrid, Spain 1992 'Through the Artists' Eyes' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1992 'Rafiki wa zamani' Gallery Watatu, Nairobi, Kenya 1992 'Kenya Art...

Category

1980s Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Elizabeth SheppellTropic

$1,350

H 33 in W 27 in

Tropic

By Elizabeth Sheppell

Located in Atlanta, GA

"Life can take you on many paths that help mold you. My paintings are a journey they take me on. The love of color and textures, building up, and tearing down is such an exciting pro...

Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Paper, Acrylic

UBALDO CINCIARINIExotic Birds, ca. 1960

$600Sale Price|20% Off

H 16.13 in W 10.13 in D 0.5 in

Exotic Birds

Located in Wilton Manors, FL

Exotic Birds, ca. 1960. Enameled steel plate, 6.5 x 12.5 inches; 10 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches framed. Original studio label affixed on verso. Unsigned. UBALDO CINCIARINI (1940-2020) was an Italian enameller and embosser who studied his craft at the famous Ferruccio Mengaroni Art Institute in Pesaro, Italy before opening the "Studio Cellini...

Category

Mid-20th Century Abstract Paintings

Materials

Enamel, Steel

Gustav Likan 1Jungle

$15,000

H 50 in W 60 in

Jungle

By Gustav Likan 1

Located in Austin, TX

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas Canvas Size: 60 x 50 in. Frame Size: 62 x 52 in. Signed, bottom right. This vivid and evocative painting captures a dense, mystical jungle scene rendered i...

Category

Mid-20th Century Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

PARK, JAE KONUntitled, 1993

$24,000

H 24 in W 28.5 in D 1 in

Untitled

Located in Palm Desert, CA

A painting by Jae Kon Park. "Untitled" is an abstract painting, oil on canvas in blues, oranges, and greens by Korean, Post-War artist Jae Kon Park. The artwork is signed in the lower left, "JE Kon Park. 93". Born in South Korea, Park Jae Kon...

Category

Late 20th Century Post-War Abstract Paintings

Materials

Oil

Irina BurdaJungle, 2026

$764

H 34.26 in W 26.38 in D 1.19 in

Jungle

By Irina Burda

Located in Zofingen, AG

“Jungle” is not a place — it is a state. A dense, almost corporeal surface where paint breathes and presses at once. There are no paths here — only intuition, only the sense that so...

Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Untitled, 1950

$750

H 14 in W 18 in

Untitled

Located in Buffalo, NY

An unsigned mid century modern American abstract painting

Category

1950s American Modern Abstract Paintings

Materials

Board, Illustration Board, Oil

Indian Modernist Painting

$750

H 22.5 in W 18.5 in

Indian Modernist Painting

Located in Surfside, FL

God, Keeper, and Maker of all Air Tola-Kina. Figural Abstract Gouache Watercolor Painting.

Category

20th Century Modern Figurative Paintings

Materials

India Ink, Watercolor, Gouache

PARK, JAE KONUntitled, 1991

$24,000

H 24 in W 28.75 in D 1 in

Untitled

Located in Palm Desert, CA

A painting by Jae Kon Park. "Untitled" is an abstract painting, oil on canvas in blues, oranges, and greens by Korean, Post-War artist Jae Kon Park. The artwork is signed in the lowe...

Category

Late 20th Century Post-War Abstract Paintings

Materials

Oil

PARK, JAE KONUntitled, 1983

$24,000

H 24 in W 28.75 in D 1 in

Untitled

Located in Palm Desert, CA

A painting by Jae Kon Park. "Untitled" is an abstract painting, oil on canvas in blues, oranges, and greens by Korean, Post-War artist Jae Kon Park. The artwork is signed in the lowe...

Category

Late 20th Century Post-War Abstract Paintings

Materials

Oil

More From This Seller

View All

Dan HowardAbstract, 1971

Abstract

Located in Missouri, MO

Abstract, 1971 By Dan Howard (b. 1931) Unframed: 29" x 35" Framed: 30" x 36" Signed Lower Left Influenced by artists of such varying styles as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, De Kooning and Jack Levine, as well as many of the German Neo-Expressionists*, Dan Howard's work often blurs the line between representational* and abstract art*. His experimentation with different canvas preparations, his use of intense colors and his expressive brush strokes have created a myriad of visual combinations in his characteristic larger-sized oil paintings. The result is an emphasis on audience participation and the role of individual interpretation. "I want to make the viewer part of the process. That makes for a richer experience," Howard says. Throughout his career, Howard has been both a dedicated art teacher-administrator and a gifted professional artist. He chaired the departments of art at Arkansas State University, Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Howard has received 100 prizes, awards and honors including the top awards in the three longest running national open painting competitions: Society of Four Arts, Palm Beach, Fla.; Butler Institute, Youngstown, Ohio; and Chautauqua Institution, New York. The Omaha World-Herald has acknowledged Howard as "Nebraska's leading award-winning artist." His work is a part of more than 600 public, private and corporate collections including Hallmark Cards, West Law Publishing, United Airlines, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M), Holiday Inn...

Category

20th Century Abstract Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Ken AndersonAbstract Horizontal, 1985

Abstract Horizontal

Located in Missouri, MO

Ken Anderson (20th century) was active/lived in United States. Ken Anderson is known for Abstract hanging sculpture. *See included images and video

Category

1980s American Modern Abstract Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Wood, Mixed Media, Oil, Handmade Paper

Ferol K. Sibley WarthenOrnaments, 1953

Ornaments

Located in Missouri, MO

Ornaments, 1953 Ferol K. Sibley Warthen (American, 1890-1986) Color Woodblock Print 7 x 4.75 inches 16 x 13.75 inches with frame Signed and Dated Lower Right Titled Lower Left Born 1890, Died 1986...

Category

1950s American Modern Abstract Prints

Materials

Color

Ferol K. Sibley WarthenAngel, 1952

Angel

Located in Missouri, MO

Angel, 1952 Ferol K. Sibley Warthen (American, 1890-1986) Color Woodblock Print 6.5 x 5 inches 16 x 13.75 inches with frame Signed Lower Right Titled Lower Left Born 1890, Died 1986...

Category

1950s American Modern Abstract Prints

Materials

Color

Nick SchleicherGMA-HLK, 2019

GMA-HLK

By Nick Schleicher

Located in Missouri, MO

Nick Schleicher (American, b. 1988) GMA-HLK 2019 Acrylic, Fluorescent Pigment, Iridescent Pigment, & Gel Gloss on Panel 36 x 26 inches Signed, Dated, a...

Category

2010s Contemporary Abstract Paintings

Materials

Glaze, Acrylic, Wood Panel, Pigment

Bram Van VeldeAbstract (Edition 95/100), Unknown

Abstract (Edition 95/100)

By Bram Van Velde

Located in Missouri, MO

Abstract (Edition 95/100) By Bram Van Velde (1895-1981) Numbered Lower Left Signed Lower Center Unframed: 37" x 24" Framed: 37.5" x 25.25" Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme*, and Lyrical Abstraction*. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris* but his work resides somewhere between expressionism* and surrealism*, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du...

Category