At Independent 20th Century, Fraenkel Gallery will exhibit work by self-taught artist B.J. Newton alongside photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The presentation will pair Newton’s thickly painted, fantastical works with Meatyard’s genre-spanning photographs from the 1950s and ‘60s.
Incarcerated in California for most of his adult life, B.J. Newton (1926–1994) created paintings populated with dreamlike creatures, symbols, and landscapes, grouped under the name “Depositional Records of the Second Coming in Abomination of Desolation.” Chronicling glory and destruction with a Biblical arc, his work suggests an opaque personal mythology, where blue-eyed characters appear to stand in for the artist himself.
Other figures emerge or dissolve into brush-hewn, cartoonish shapes, and landscapes are split open to reveal underworlds. In beach views, the blood-red sun is paired with a pale blue cross or replaced by a five-pointed star. Newton’s paintings suggest a kind of homespun cosmology, filled with traces of spiritual struggle and yearning.
Newton’s paintings were offered for sale at the Folsom Prison store in the 1960s and 1970s. They are virtually unknown outside of a small circle of artists, curators, and admirers. During his lifetime his paintings appeared in several group exhibitions, including American Primitive and Naive Art, at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970, organized by curator Philip Linhares and artist Jim Nutt.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) was a visionary photographer based in Lexington, Kentucky who made his living as an optician. His series include photographs of family members and friends posed in dimestore Halloween masks, and extensive experiments in abstraction. Meatyard often employed multiple exposures, motion-blur, and other nontraditional photographic methods. With an emphasis on shadowed locations and enigmatic characters engaged in mysterious rituals, his work has sometimes drawn comparisons with Southern Gothic literature, but the full complexity of his visual language often remains inscrutable.
Working under radically different circumstances, Newton and Meatyard each developed a deeply personal view of the metaphysical. Each constructed a distinctive visual vocabulary shaped largely outside institutional art circles. But while Meatyard’s photographs transformed the people and places around him into philosophical allegories, by necessity Newton’s paintings turned inward, creating self-contained mythologies governed by their own symbolic logic. Seen together, the pairing reveals artists who each developed distinct formal languages to make visible what lies beyond ordinary perception.
