Each year for the past three years, Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Culver City, California, has hosted a group landscape show based on a specific location to garner various interpretations of a breathtaking locale. Gallery director and owner Beau Alexander calls the destinations “magical,” and says this year’s Monument Valley focus is “about as unique as you can get from any other landscape in the rest of the world.”
“With a group landscape show like this, we really get to seen an artist’s perspective,”
says Alexander. “If this were strictly a figurative show, each artist would paint a figure they like in their style. We’d be able to see different viewpoints, but ultimately, the subject would be different, and it would be hard to see differences. A landscape like Monument Valley isn’t going to change, and most of us all see it the same, but by asking artists to all paint this iconic location, we really get a chance to see what the artist sees. This exhibition will truly show the artist’s vision.”
The 10 participating artists include Logan Maxwell Hagege, Mark Maggiori, and Scott Burdick. The exhibition will feature about 15 works, ranging from the dramatic cloud-filled oil on linen Dark Clouds, Monument Valley, by G. Russell Case; to the exaggerated shapes found in Tracy Felix’s abstract-tinged oil on panel Valley Towers; to Billy Schenck’s oil on canvas Coming from the Bisti and Glenn Dean’s oil Navajo Moonrise, featuring Navajo figures on horseback.
David Grossmann, represented with his oil on linen panel work Stone and Cloud Patterns,
has been painting in Monument Valley for years and says the area brings out emotional feelings for him, of feeling fragile and temporary. “In Monument Valley, there is an immediate sense of contrast because the vastness of the landscape makes everything else feel insignificant,” says Grossmann. “That morning in Monument Valley that inspired this painting was a reminder to me of how grateful I am for my life as an artist and for these opportunities to find inspiration in such wonderful places.”