Eugene Newmann: Abstraction and Figuration

August 20 - September 17, 2022

Artist in Conversation with Author Frederick Turner
August 27 at 4:00 pm

Reception with the Artist
August 27, 4:30 - 6:00 pm

Eugene Newmann, 'Arroyo', 2021, oil on canvas

Eugene Newmann, Arroyo, 2019, 80 x 60", oil on canvas

Eugene Newmann has long been regarded as one of the pioneering artists in the New Mexico abstract art scene. He is well known in the Santa Fe art community for being a ‘painter's painter,’ drawing admiration from many of his peers.

The selection of works for this exhibition included paintings from 1976-78 – such as Neighboring Constellations, which was exhibited at the iconic Santa Fe Armory Show – to landscape-inspired abstractions such as the 2019 Arroyo, to recently completed works on paper from the Postures series.

Eugene Newmann, Neighboring Constellations, oil on canvas

Eugene Newmann, Neighboring Constellations, 1978, oil on canvas

Through his creative process, Newmann explores and mediates complex and contradictory dynamics. He maintains a dialogue between the deep space of the Old Masters' painting and the modernist flat picture plane. In his richly reworked surfaces, he blurs the distinction between figuration and abstraction. If there ever was a clear distinction between those genres in his work, it has disappeared long ago. “I don’t know that there’s a useful distinction to make,” said Newmann. “I started painting in the mid-1950s. At that point, you had to declare. How were you going to approach making an image? There were just a ton of propositions, and it was something to develop. I can’t figure that some kind of ideological position is going to be the ticket to a new image for me."

Newmann’s Czechoslovakian heritage (he was born in Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia), his life in Colombia, where Spanish was his first language, his traditional Jewish upbringing in New York City after age ten, and his education in mathematics and physics at the University of Chicago make him an artist of unusual breadth of knowledge and experience. He moved to Santa Fe with his wife artist Dana Newmann in 1972. Since then, Eugene Newmann has become known as a central figure in New Mexico’s abstract art world.

His work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Albuquerque, The Capitol Foundation Collection, in Santa Fe, NM, The Roswell Museum and Art Center, The Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, The Tucson Museum of Art, and The U.S. Department of State Art Bank. He received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2008. He received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2008.

Newmann's work has been reproduced, cited, or reviewed in many publications, including Art in America, American Artist, House Beautiful, Artspace, Art Voices South, TREND, and THE magazine. It appears in Jan Adleman’s book “Contemporary Art in New Mexico”, and also in the following books published by the Museum of New Mexico Press: “Modern Masterworks from the Collection”, “Artists of 20th Century New Mexico”, “New Mexico Artists at Work”, and, most recently, in “How the West was One”.