LewAllen Galleries

Santa Fe, NM—LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Keith Johnston: Fauna, Fruit & Fables. On view at the gallery’s historic downtown venue from September 2 – October 2, 2011, the exhibition features the artist’s most recent minimalist compositions characterized by spare, tonal arrangements of light and dark forms interspersed with tentative whispers of drawings.

Johnston creates his paintings on wood panel in encaustic, which is often scraped and meticulously reapplied, before the addition of gestural graphite markings. Eschewing preliminary sketches and embracing automatist visual strategies, he relies upon finely honed artistic instincts and acute intuition to inform his unerringly harmonized compositions. Achieving a precise balance between form and texture, Johnston’s manifold approach oscillates between broad compositional outlines and a surface rich with intimate, labor-intensive modulations. He notes that he “aims to see the markings of the artist’s hand, the process of spontaneity, the economy—where subtlety, pitch, line or blocking, with the slightest of movement, can completely alter the work.” His astute attention to the varying tactility of his materials, in conjunction with a keen ability to manipulate our distinctions between representational and abstract subjects, places Johnston at a profound crossroads in contemporary painting.

Since earning his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1980, Keith Johnston has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his paintings and drawings are actively sought by significant collections internationally. The artist lives and works in Santa Fe and New York City.