About the Show
"Play It by Eye" The Art of by Leo Valledor
The Togonon Gallery presents "Play It By Eye: The Art of Leo Valledor" a tribute to painter Leo Valledor (1936-1989), one of America's pre-eminent Asian American artists and master of geometric abstraction. This gallery exhibition runs concurrently with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's (SFMOMA) "Abstract Art in the U.S. 1955-1965, Selections from the Permanent Collection," part of the 75th Anniversary show. The museum's exhibition positions Leo Valledor with prominent artists of the mid-century including Rothko, Motherwell, Kline, Guston, Diebenkorn, Voulkos, Mitchell, and Bladen.
"Play It By Eye: The Art of Leo Valledor" demonstrates Valledor's journey into new forms of painting. An originating member of the influential Park Place Group in New York during the advent of minimalism in the 1960's, he abandoned Abstract Expressionism and undertook geometric abstraction, taking it to the extreme of hard-edge minimalism. In this vein he explored color, shape and space for nearly three decades until this untimely death in 1989. He showed at the time with other avant-garde artists including Sol Le Witt, Robert Smithson and Donald Judd, among others.
Many of the works here are being seen for the first time and some have not been shown since Valledor's solo shows at the de Young museum, the LA Institute of Contemporary Art and SFMOMA in the 1970's. Art critics have placed Valledor's work in the league of Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith. Furthermore, a definitive survey of American abstract artists, "The New American Abstraction 1950-1970" by Claudine Humblet, squarely recognizes Valledor as an important member of the minimalist movement. The prominent San Francisco art critics Alfred Frankenstein, Knute Stiles and Kenneth Baker have described Valledor's work as elegant and deceptively simple. As someone who preferred to eschew semantics, Valledor summarized his process in a few words: "I play it by eye."
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