Ronnie Landfield’s Monumental Paintings Take Over Findlay Galleries in New York

Ronnie Landfield’s expansive canvases, currently on view at Findlay Galleries in New York, evoke scenery from distant mountains and spectacular sunsets to vast expanses along waters and horizons. Titled “Monumental Works,” the exhibition features a selection of works that dominate their walls with landscape-like washes of color, with bold shades melting into one another or meeting in contrast. In some, jagged crevasses resemble the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but are an effect rooted in the properties of the paint that Landfield uses. The interplay between the artist’s instincts and the behavior of his materials is one of the defining characteristics on display. “Everything I have ever felt, in the air around me and within my soul, is on the line in and laid bare in these paintings,” he told Galerie.

At 79, Ronnie Landfield is a raconteur whose stories stretch back to the glory days of New York’s art scene. Raised in the Bronx, he attended the High School of Art and Design. In 1967, he exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and two years later he mounted his first solo exhibition at David Whitney Gallery. 

Landfield’s artistic path has taken him through a who’s who of cameos by top 20th-century American artists. Following the opening of the Findlay show, Landfield recalled over dinner at the Metropolitan Club that he and Lee Krasner were united in their loathing for art critic Clement Greenberg. His tales bring back a lost New York, where Landfield occupied the same Tribeca loft for 43 years. When he and two fellow artists moved into the six-story building, their monthly rent totalled $750, divided three ways. Each artist took two floors, allowing Landfield the studio space needed to produce his ambitious paintings. He remained there until Hurricane Sandy struck Lower Manhattan in 2012, which eventually precipitated a move upstate.

Another fascinating chapter of Landfield’s career concerns the acrylics themselves. Although acrylic chemistry predates World War II, paints formulated specifically for artists began to emerge in the years afterward. Among their pioneers were Leonard Bocour and his nephew Sam Golden, who met Landfield in the 1960s. The pair generously supplied him with gallons of their Aquatec paint, helping him develop the techniques that became central to his work.

Over the course of his career, Landfield’s paintings have been acquired by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Art Institute of Chicago. With all of of these achievements, Landfield is just as enthusiastic about the work of other artists, among them the students he has taught for decades at the Art Students League of New York. “I have always enjoyed engaging and encouraging and supporting artists to find themselves and to develop their own creative being,” Landfield explains. “The league has always been the place where artists can find and become their true selves.”

That same zest comes through in his conversation and in the paintings themselves. Landfield has spent a lifetime making gorgeous works that transform color into something approaching an experience of nature. More than half a century after his earliest successes, his vast canvases remain as bold, colorful, and individual as their creator.

“Ronnie Landfield: Monumental Works” is on view at Findlay Galleries, 32 East 57th Street, New York, through December 3, 2026.