James Fuentes Gallery

"This is a very chaotic world and a very chaotic time. The planet needs our attention. It needs harmony. My gift is a gift of making harmony."—Ed Baynard

James Fuentes is very pleased to present Ed Baynard's suite of iconic still life paintings, spanning 1978 through 1985. Although highly prolific throughout his long career, the artist is best known for these works which distill his meditations on beauty and unapologetic stylistic pursuit. In these paintings we encounter Baynard's "Zen-like dedication to depicting flowers in vases in open spaces," as Jerry Saltz describes, "every line is just so, every millimeter of surface considered.” Possessing complex bursts of detail and eruptions of color against profoundly empty backgrounds, these paintings foreground the aesthetically transgressive nature of his vision, recalling a diverse set of influences, from Zen minimalism to Andy Warhol paint-by-numbers compositions, Georgia O’Keeffe’s observations of the American landscape, Charles Demuth’s linear Precisionism, the textured flatness of Alex Katz paintings, and the graphic aesthetic of the Japanese Ukiyo-e tradition. Yet Baynard's work remains forever singular, achieving no less than a revolution of style through a place of calm.

Ed Baynard (1940-2016) rose to prominence as an artist in the 1970s, marked by solo exhibitions in New York at Willard Gallery (1971), Betty Parsons (1973), Marian Goodman (1977), and Barbara Gladstone (1980/81); as well as John Berggruen in San Francisco (1980). Baynard’s work is held in the permanent collections of many institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; High Museum, Atlanta; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Tate Galleries, London; Australian National Gallery; and The Center for Contemporary Graphic Art, Fukushima, Japan. Most recently, in 2019 Baynard’s work was celebrated in acclaimed solo exhibitions held at White Columns, New York, co-curated by Matthew Higgs and Vince Aletti, and at Stephen Friedman, London in 2020.

Read the gallery's publication, In a Yellow Room (published 2023) in full online: here.