Untitled

Eugene Newmann was born in Czechoslovakia, but his Orthodox Jewish family fled Europe soon after his birth. He subsequently grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia and later moved to Chicago, New York City, and Monterey, California, where he lived from 1962 to 1972. In 1972, he relocated to Northern New Mexico, where he has remained and where the painting being offered was created. Throughout his career, he has made little effort to distinguish between abstraction and figuration: “I don’t know that there’s a useful distinction to make,” he explained in 2022, “I started painting in the mid-1950s. At that point, you had to declare. How were you going to approach making an image? … I can’t figure that some kind of ideological position is going to be the ticket to a new image for me.” His working practice often begins with a fairly straight-forward depiction of a figure, which he then manipulates in a serious of steps, resulting in an “abstract” canvas.