Current Exhibitions

A committed and talented artist from an early age, Ronnie Landfield’s professional career as a painter began with Minimalist and Hard-Edge painting in 1965 at the age of 18. By the late 1960s, he found his passion for the lyrical abstractions of Color Field painting. These Lyrical abstractions, informed by his deep understanding of pure color in minimalist solid form, became his trademark artistic style which he displayed to great effect throughout his career. His work conjures the natural world at all scales and often reminds us of the duality of existence itself, random and planned, organic and artificial, Color Field and Hard-Edge. 

Since his first exhibition in 1967, Ronnie Landfield has enjoyed a successful and progressive career as an artist. Widely collected and critically recognized, Landfield’s work has been included in many important institutions and permanent collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art,
the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recently, Landfield received the 2022 Hamptons Fine Art Fair Lifetime Achievement in Painting Award, honoring his contributions and dedication to American abstraction.

Findlay Galleries proudly represents Ronnie Landfield exclusively and welcomes you to enjoy this new collection of his paintings on view in Palm Beach.

Findlay Galleries presents The Pursuit of Color, an exhibition of works by British contemporary impressionist painter Charles Neal. The exhibition explores the significant role of color in a composition and its relationship to the themes Neal explores in his works, particularly the effect of time on subject and place. In addition to paintings that capture an impressionist en plein air moment, the exhibition includes works from his Alter-Realist series. These Alter Realist paintings are wide-ranging in their application of color theory, capturing a variety of tonalities. We invite you to enjoy this exhibition of new works by Charles Neal at Findlay Galleries’ Palm Beach location.

Findlay Galleries is pleased to present a comprehensive exhibition of Robert Natkin paintings featuring important paintings from the artist’s most desirable periods.

Natkin created some of the most innovative color abstractions of the late 20th century. Populated by various formal elements -stripes, dots, grids, and free-floating forms, his light-filled canvases are sensuous, playful, and visually complex. Natkin was the subject of a major monograph written by British art critic Peter Fuller, who aptly described his paintings as a “veil on the infinite.”

Born in 1930, Natkin studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he found inspiration in the color and patterns of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse and drew a lifelong interest in emotional content from Paul Klee’s Oeuvre. Natkin moved to New York where his reputation was enhanced with his inclusion in Americans Under 35 at the Whitney Museum in 1960, the first of several museum exhibitions during his career. He enjoyed critical and commercial success for several decades and lived in Danbury, Connecticut, with his wife and fellow artist, Judith Dolnick, until his death in 2010.

Over the course of his long career, Natkin was widely recognized for successfully achieving his stated goal of “making paintings that are more interesting tomorrow than they are today.” His paintings are in the collections of several prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).

Primitive Worlds

Findlay Galleries is proud to present Primitive Worlds, an exhibition featuring paintings by Camille Bombois, Orville Bulman, Henri Maïk, Ljubomir Milinkov, Annette Ollivary, and Gustavo Novoa at our Palm Beach gallery in December 2022.

While the first Naïf painters made an appearance in the 1600’s, the work of Henri Rousseau in the late 1800’s strongly influenced a future generation of artists who desired a primitive freshness in their work. The unfettered creativity that came with being self-taught defined the Naif painter. As modern living reached all continents in the 20th century, the art world developed an affinity for the sophisticated simplicity of Naïf paintings, contrasting the graying and troubled world outside.

Beginning in 1931 with an exhibition at his Chicago gallery, Wally Findlay was the first US art dealer dedicated to developing and representing European Naïf painters. Findlay Galleries’ first selection of works by Rousseau and Bombois eventually expanded to include contemporary artists such as Maïk, Ollivary, and Novoa. This new group used the Naif style of painting to create art outside traditional realms; objects, landscapes, and creatures exist in an everlasting Eden. While different from their predecessors, they remained true to the craftsmanship, manifest sense of composition, expressive use of color, and solid foundation of design typical of Naïf painters. Findlay Galleries is delighted to share their creativity with you in Primitive Worlds.

Fritz Rauh was born in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1920. He enrolled in the Braunschweig Art School in 1938, although his studies were interrupted by WWII. Following the war, he completed his formal training in Braunschweig and met his future wife, Alix; they emigrated to the United States in 1954 and settled in Marin County, California.

Rauh had his first solo exhibition in 1956 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition was well received by critics applauding Rauh’s unique approach to canvas as a surface to be “opened” with color and shapes. Small amoeba-like shapes filled his canvases, closely packed on a contrasting and sometimes harmonizing ground in a way that foreground and background become interchangeable. The vibrating surface that resulted, heightened by areas of flat color defining the limits of the canvas, evokes the beauty of micro-organic worlds.

Rauh’s critical and commercial success in the following decades led to his works being exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including SF MOMA, Oakland Art Museum, International Art Expo in Osaka, Japan and Gallerie Schreiner in Basel, Switzerland. Today, Findlay Galleries is proud to represent the artist’s estate exclusively.

British-born American painter Gordon Onslow Ford (1912-2003) was an important bridge between the Parisian Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements, exploring interests in spontaneous creation and metaphysical ideas like the collective unconscious.

After serving in the Royal Navy, Onslow Ford departed for Paris and worked briefly with André Lhote and Fernand Léger. Roberto Matta introduced him to André Breton, Max Ernst, and other Parisian Surrealists. During this period, Onslow Ford abandoned the pictorial images of his early work and embraced psychic automatism.

In 1941, he lectured on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research in New York. Audience members included Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. In the same year, he traveled to Mexico and lived among the Tarascan Indians until 1947. “Resigning” from Surrealism in 1943, his spontaneous gestures expanded first into more studied, map-like compositions. These eventually resolved into simple geometries that led him to an awareness of line, circle, and dot as the root forms of the universe.

Returning to San Francisco, Onslow Ford exhibited in two shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art. A solo show in 1949 was followed by his inclusion in the landmark Dynaton exhibition in 1951. In the following decades, his paintings were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Tate Gallery, Whitney Museum, and several other important institutions.

Over the course of his long career, Onslow Ford’s work evolved from the earthly into the cosmic. The outer becomes inner, as the constellations self-manifest in the shared consciousness, stopping briefly to mark the canvases of Gordon Onslow Ford.