1922-2014

Edwin Ruda holds a unique place in the development of abstract art in the late twentieth century.  By contrast with many artists who did not step beyond a stylistic boundary, he consistently and purposefully explored the linkages, incongruities, and connections between minimalism and the modes of geometric and lyrical abstraction.  The result is a body of work characterized by elegant and radiant resolutions of the seemingly contradictory. In 1973, Peter Schjeldahl stated in a New York Times review that the best of Ruda’s paintings attained “a level of practically spiritual elevation.” Schjeldahl went on to state that it was precisely due to this quality that Ruda’s works seemed “out of step with their Soho context,” concluding that they “‘belong’ to no Zeitgeist, only to the art of painting.”  In the early 1960s, Ruda was a leading figure in the Park Place Group, the model for the activist and cooperative galleries that followed, and his art was featured in many of the most significant exhibitions of American abstraction from the 1960s through the 1990s.  

Ruda was born in New York City and grew up in the East Bronx.  After graduating from high school, he entered the School of Agriculture at Cornell University.  His studies were interrupted at the end of his sophomore year when he enrolled in the navy during World War II.  In 1945, after serving a three-year tour of duty in the Southwest Pacific, he returned to Cornell on the G.I. Bill, completing his course work in biological sciences and studying figurative drawing.  He received his bachelor’s of science from Cornell in 1947 and subsequently returned to Manhattan, where he enrolled in art classes at The New School for Social Research.  There, Adja Yunkers was among the teachers he found to be the most stimulating.  In 1948, with the continued help of the G.I. Bill, he entered Teachers College, Columbia University, where he received a Master of Arts degree in 1949.  In the three years that followed, he studied at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Instituto National de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.  He then taught painting for one year at the University of Texas, El Paso.  In 1956, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.  In the three years that followed, he taught painting at the University of Texas, Austin. 

On his return to New York City in 1960, Ruda rented a temporary studio at 79 Park Place, which became the home by 1963 for the Park Place Group, consisting of artists from the West and East coasts who, showed their work informally, establishing a spirit of mutual influence.  In addition to Ruda, the artists included were Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor, Anthony Magar, Mark di Suvero, Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers, and Leo Valledor.  The Park Place Group shared a passion for large-scale sculptures and paintings, which Ruda—as the spokesman for the group—described as “not illustrations of ideas,” but instead “part of the emotional content of the sixties.”  When the Park Place lease expired in the spring of 1964, several of the artists found backers who helped them establish a new gallery at 542 Broadway, incorporated in 1965 as Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc.  This name was intended to express the group’s spirit of experimentation and discovery.  Its first director was John Gibson, and its first president was Paula Cooper.  In February of 1967, Ruda and di Suvero were featured in a joint exhibition at the new gallery. 

During the 1960s, Ruda was included in many landmark shows, including Systemic Painting, held at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966; the Park Place Gallery Exhibition, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968; Cool Art, held at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1968; Two Generations of Color Painting, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in 1970; two Whitney Museum biennials (1969 and 1973); and several others.  From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, he showed at the new gallery established by Paula Cooper on Prince Street in Soho that was modeled on Park Place. 

Committed to abstraction, Ruda evolved in several directions in his art during the 1960s and 1970s.  His first works were soft-edged minimalist abstractions in a lyrical mode that in their ambiguous planes evoked the spirit of impressionism.  By 1962, he had introduced hard-edged shapes into his art, creating arrangements with strong geometric and optical properties. In the next period, he explored ways of reconciling these two forms of abstraction, often finding a transitional place between them.  His approach is demonstrated in his “band” paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which he blended the systemic and the accidental.  While starting with vertical or horizontal structures, he loosened the flow of his paint and introduced pure and translucent colors that are rarely part of minimalist statements.  He then had to work through the contradictions that resulted without allowing structure or formlessness to dominate, which at times entailed erasures or additions, echoes or accents.  Each work thus became a closed system with its own internal logic. James Gleeson wrote in 1974 review of a show of Ruda’s art at Gallery A, Sydney Australia, that the artist had found the “missing link between minimal art and lyric abstraction.”  Schjeldahl stated in 1973 that Ruda, “a painter of large, complex painterly abstractions,” was “an artist often overlooked in discussions of contemporary painting, but I believe one of the finest in America.”  Schjeldahl further noted:  “There is a wonderful balance of ambiguities in these paintings, between paint perceived as color and paint perceived as physical substance. . . . The unifying ambiguity, so to speak, is between a sense of spatial depths suggested by layered ‘veils’ of color and a sense of surface flatness enforced by the clear evidence, everywhere, of the artist’s hand.”

In the mid-1970s, Ruda also created large shaped paintings, including a series in the form of huge diamonds.  One of these works was described by Holland Cotter in a New York Times review of a 1992 solo show of Ruda’s art as “possessing a gritty radiance.”  Ruda has continued to use abstraction to develop his conceptual and painterly ideas over a long career. 

Among the shows featuring Ruda’s art from the late 1970s onward are Benefit for Udine, Italy, held in 1976 at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery (organized by Thomas Hess and Carl Andre); Painting Up Front, held in 1981 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York; Temporal Surfaces, held in 1992 at Davidson College Gallery of Art, North Carolina; Incidence of Passage, held in 1993 at Art Initiatives, New York; Mindscapes, organized in 1995 by Independent Artists, New York; Turning the Corner: Abstraction at the End of the Twentieth Century, held in 1997 at Hunter College of the City University of New York; and most recently in 2014, Edwin Ruda: The Band Paintings (1969-1972), has traveled from Berry Campbell in Chelsea to the Frank and Gertrude Kaiser Art Gallery at Molloy College.  Ruda’s work has been discussed extensively over the years in Art in America, Art News, Artforum, and Arts Magazine.  His work is included in numerous public collections including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Canberra National Museum, Australia; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, New York; the Greenville County Museum, South Carolina; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Katonah Art Center, New York; the Lannan Foundation; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; the Udine Museum of Art, Italy (collective gift organized by Thomas Hess); the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina;  and the William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut.

CV

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Kaiser Art Gallery, Molloy College, , Rockville Centre, New York, 2014
Berry Campbell, New York, New York, 2014
Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, New York, 2005
June Kelly Gallery, New York, New York, 2005
June Kelly Gallery, New York, New York, 1995
June Kelly Gallery, New York, New York, 1992
June Kelly Gallery, New York, New York, 1988
Condeso/Lawler Gallery, New York, New York, 1988
Max Hutchinson Gallery, Houston, Texas, 1979
Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1979
Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, New York, 1978
Ohio State University, Columbus, 1978
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York, 1975
Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1974
Gallery A, Sydney, Australia, 1973
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York, 1973
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York, 1971
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York, 1969
Park Place Gallery, New York, New York, 1967-68
Feiner Gallery, New York, New York, 1963
Globe Gallery, New York, New York, 1961

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Berry Campbell, New York, Art Wynwood Art Fair, Miami, Florida, 2014
Condesco/Lawler Gallery, New York, Abstraction Index, 1997
Hunter College, City University of New York, Turning the Corner: Abstraction at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1997
Organization of Independent Artists, New York, Mindscapes, 1995
June Kelly at Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, New York, A Particular Vision,1994
Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, Color/Structure: Abstract Paintings of the 1960s, 1993
Gallery Esvansadam, New York, Presence and Absence, 1993
Davidson College Gallery of Art, North Carolina, Temporal Surfaces, 1992
Twining Gallery, New York, 1989
June Kelly Gallery, New York, 1987
Condesco/Lawler Gallery, New York, 1987
Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York, Painting Up Front, 1981
Ericson Gallery, Painting as Percept, New York, 1980
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, Benefit Exhibition for Udine, Italy, Organzied by Thomas Hess and Carl Andre, 1976
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 1974
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial,”1973
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Work from the Early Sixties, 1973
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, Painting and Sculpture 1972, 1972
Gallery A, Sydney, Australia, Eight from New York, 1971
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Painting and Sculpture Today, 1971
30th Annual Exhibition of the Society for Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, 1970
ICA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Two Generations of Color Painting, 1970
Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, American Drawings, 1970
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Biennial, 1969
The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, Cool Art, 1969
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Park Place Gallery Exhibition, 1968
ICA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Art in the City, 1967
Park Place Gallery, New York, New York, 1967
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Systemic Painting, 1966
Park Place Gallery, New York, 1966
Park Place Gallery, New York, 1965
Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York, 1964
Park Place Gallery, New York, 1964
Park Place Gallery, New York 1963
Great Jones Gallery, New York, 1961

PUBLIC AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania
Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia
Canberra National Museum, Canberra, Australia
Chase Manhattan Bank, NY
Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, NY
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
The Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY
Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin
John F. Kennedy Airport, Queens, New York
The Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
Katonah Art Center, Katonah, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
Udine Museum of Art, Udine, Italy
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts
Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina
William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs