Upcoming Show
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 has long been regarded as one of the pioneering artists in the Santa Fe art scene. Newmann’s paintings hover between abstraction and figuration. If there ever was a clear distinction between those genres in his work, it has disappeared — after all, most contemporary art seems to blur those lines by definition.
Newmann was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now the capital of Slovakia) in 1936, raised in Columbia and schooled in Brooklyn and Chicago. In the 1950s he attended the University of Chicago, getting his bachelor’s degree in business in 1957. He has made New Mexico his home since the 1970s.
Newmann, who is self-taught, received a 2008 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He is well known in the Santa Fe art community for being a "painter's painter," drawing admiration from many of his peers.
“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." - Eugene Newmann