Current Shows
John Connell + Eugene Newmann
May 3 - June 7, 2025
Opening Reception | Saturday, May 3, 4-6 pm
Eugene Newmann, Neighboring Constellations, 1978, oil on canvas, 44 x 60 in.
Pie Projects Contemporary Art is honored to present the exhibition John Connell + Eugene Newmann, featuring paintings, works on paper, and bronze sculptures by two legendary artists whose decades long friendship span into a remarkable working collaboration that ended only by Connell's death in 2009.
Notably, the two artists collaborated on The Raft Project (1989–1994): A giant sculpture/painting project that inspired by Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. The Raft Project exhibition included life-sized sculptures made of tar, paper and wood, and monumental paintings of the sky's constellations, a reference to night navigation.
The current exhibition features The 16th Hour At Celestial Equator - one of the The Raft Project collaborative paintings - and its monumental counterpart, as well as a selection of Connell's ink drawings and small bronze sculptures, and Newmann's Virgo Constellation monoprints. Additionally, Newmann will present some of his most recents oil and acrylic paintings.
John Connell was born in Atlanta and studied at Brown University in Providence in the late 1950s. He then moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League and New York University before moving to San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Eventually relocating to the Southwest, he lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for most of his career. His artwork is included in many public and private collections, including The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; and Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, among others.
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. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the U.S. Department of State Art Bank. He is a recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
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Also on view in the gallery, works by