Announcing the Representation of Raymond Saunders

Raymond Saunders, Untitled, 1990 (detail)

David Zwirner is pleased to announce co-representation of American artist Raymond Saunders with Andrew Kreps Gallery. A two-part solo exhibition curated by Ebony L. Haynes will open on February 22 at David Zwirner’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street galleries in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps’s gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca. Titled Post No Bills, this expansive presentation will span four decades of the artist’s work. Including paintings and works on paper, many of which have never before been seen, this exhibition offers visitors insight into Saunders’s singular and influential practice.

Portrait of Raymond Saunders, 1970s

Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, Raymond Saunders first studied art in the city’s public schools, participating in a program for artistically gifted students. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught artists including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. Through Fitzpatrick’s support and encouragement, Saunders earned a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, also taking courses at the Barnes Foundation organized through the University of Pennsylvania, before returning to Pittsburgh and earning his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. He subsequently earned an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1961. In 1968, he accepted a teaching position at California State University, Hayward, eventually joining the faculty of his alma mater (now California College of the Arts), where he remains professor emeritus.

Raymond Saunders, Beauty in Darkness, 1993–1999

In his works, Saunders brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. He subsequently adds a range of other markings, materials, and talismans. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life, and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.

Saunders’s singular aesthetic finds echoes in the work of artists ranging from Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg to Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but remains unmistakably his own. As curator Connie H. Choi of The Studio Museum in Harlem describes, “Sights and sounds pass by as one moves along a city street, encountering the world, making decisions, and changing one’s mind as one goes. Such is the beauty of Saunders’s paintings. They are about life and all of its battles and victories, dirtiness and splendor.”

Raymond Saunders, Present of My Past, 1989 (detail)

In 1967, Saunders achieved wide recognition when he published the pamphlet Black Is a Color as a rebuttal to an article by the poet and critic Ishmael Reed about the Black Arts Movement. In this text, Saunders argues powerfully that Reed fails to capture the vastness of Black expression and in doing so siloes Black artists and their work as delimited by the category of race alone. He concludes with the imperative that we separate identity from artistic output.

“The creative imagination is his channel, but it has to be dug.… It is high time that the black artist make his own rejection of misguided, inadequate—if not out-and-out dishonest—interpreters of his conditions. Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?”

—Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color, 1967

Raymond Saunders, Palette, 1983 (detail)

The first solo exhibitions of Saunders’s works were held at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York (1966; 1969; 1970; 1972). In 1971, the artist was the subject of his first West Coast exhibition and first major museum presentation, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which was also shown at Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. Saunders exhibited widely across the United States and in Europe, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1974; 1990), Oakland Museum (1994), and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1996). The artist also participated in the 1972 Whitney Biennial.

Over the last two decades, Saunders has continued to be the subject of solo exhibitions globally, in addition to appearing in several notable group exhibitions, including 2011’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, curated by Kellie Jones at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled to MoMA PS1, New York, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, as well as 2017’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Brooklyn Museum, New York, and The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2022, his work appeared in the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Learn more about Raymond Saunders.

Featured works and images: Raymond Saunders, Untitled, 1990 (detail). © Raymond Saunders; Portrait of Raymond Saunders, 1970s. Photo by Anthony Barboza. Courtesy Anthony Barboza and Getty Images; Raymond Saunders, Beauty in Darkness, 1993–1999. Museum Brandhorst. © Raymond Saunders; Raymond Saunders, Present of My Past, 1989. © Raymond Saunders; Raymond Saunders, Palette, 1983 (detail). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. © Raymond Saunders; Raymond Saunders, Untitled, 1990–2000 (detail). © Raymond Saunders