March 15 - May 24, 2009 

When Life magazine did a special issue on the state of California in 1962, it focused on five artists: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, John McLaughlin, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and Roger Kuntz.  While four of these artists remain central to our understanding of the history of California art and have received numerous monographic exhibitions, little has been written on the art of Roger Kuntz.

Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction, an exhibition of some seventy paintings, drawings, and sculpture organized by Laguna Art Museum, will be the first major showing of the artist’s work since his death.  It will focus on Kuntz’s search for what he called the “middle ground” between figurative and non-figurative painting. By about 1950 Kuntz believed that post-war abstract expressionism had run its course and that the time was ripe for the reappearance of structure in art that communicated to the viewer.  Kuntz embarked on several painting series, culminating in the nationally acclaimed Freeway series.

These bare geometric paintings dated 1959 to 1962 of concrete canyons, underpasses, ramps, pedestrian spirals, tunnels, and signs carved in deep shadow and light, embodied Kuntz’s search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality. This stylistic shift away from gestural abstraction was in synch with the times and Kuntz was included in the first national survey of Pop Art organized by John Coplans, editor of Artforum magazine, in 1963.

The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction will place Kuntz’s work in a national context and explore his role in the Southern California art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition will feature the Freeway series as well as a selection from the artist’s interiors, beach scenes, signs, bathtubs, blimps, and tennis series.  Kuntz lived in Laguna Beach from 1964 until his death in 1975 at the age of 49. 

A 140 page, color catalogue (designed by Garland Kirkpatrick) with an essay by guest curator Susan M. Anderson and an introduction by Peter Plagens will accompany the exhibition.  Plagens, an artist and former critic for Newsweek magazine, observed the vital postwar art scene in California first hand.  He is the author of Sunshine Muse, the definitive survey of West Coast art from 1945 to 1970.