San Francisco, CA- Caldwell Snyder Gallery is honored to host our third exhibition for renowned artist Gregory Kondos. In this new body of work, Kondos continues to illuminate the natural splendor of his adopted home state of California. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, he has created remarkable images of California’s multifaceted beauty. It’s a pleasure to have the 93 year old artist present for his opening reception, a rare opportunity to honor the 70 year career of this enduring artist.
Widely known as one of California’s foremost landscape painters, Gregory Kondos has spent decades interpreting the natural world in his fluid, modern, Plein-Air style. Recent paintings depict scenes of water converging with land: a snaking coastline, a beach, a lake encircled by trees. The images exude an air of solitude, balancing tones of tranquility, melancholy, and independence. An island rises from the lake; a single figure sits facing the ocean; a cluster of buildings or boulders huddles on a spit along the coast. The landscape emerges as a character, stoic but benevolent, land and water accommodating each other and enhancing each other’s beauty.
Born in 1923, Kondos’s lifelong achievements place him in the great tradition of American landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Wayne Thiebaud, his longtime friend. He has exhibited widely and placed work in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Shanghai Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. As Scott Shields, Chief Curator at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, which held a solo exhibition of Kondos’s paintings in 2013, has remarked, his work “simultaneously celebrate[s] the terrain’s inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself.”
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