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David Richard Contemporary is pleased to present Music in the Garden, a selection of paintings by Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998) from her Music and Garden series produced during the1990s. Also featured will be smaller works from her Moon series of the same period and Winter series, of which thirty-one paintings were produced during the last several months of her life.

Mandelman painted a number of diptychs and triptychs in the 1990s in several series, such as Jazz, Carnival, New York, Garden and Music. Influenced throughout her career by various artists who practiced a range of modernist styles from different art historical movements, much of her work from the 80s and 90s was a melding and fusion of the past into the present. She developed her own signature style though and extended into painting the same collage-like approach that she loved and utilized in her earlier works on paper. The Garden and Music series are the most reductive of these later series with large blocks of a limited color palette, generous use of black, lyrical and harmonic compositions—a nice contrast to the more visually active compositions seen in many of the works in the Jazz, Carnival and New York series.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Beatrice Mandelman studied at Rutgers University and the Art Student’s League. She was employed by the Works Project Administration in New York from 1935 to 1942 where she became associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis. By 1941, her works were included in important exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1944 she and Louis Ribak—her husband—moved to Taos, New Mexico. Mandelman moved briefly to Paris in 1948 to study with Fernand Léger until 1949, where she also met and became friends with Francis Picabia. Part of the group of artists known as the Taos Moderns, which also included Louis Ribak, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, Mandelman was a dedicated painter and committed to modernism and abstraction throughout her career. She exhibited all over New Mexico and in Los Angeles and New York, including a Whitney Annual Exhibition.

Mandelman’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum (NY), Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH), Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Frederick R Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN), Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK), Harwood Museum, University of New Mexico (Taos, NM), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM), Museum of Modern Art (NY), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts (Springfield, MA), Whitney Museum of American Art (NY) among others.

David Richard Contemporary is located in downtown Santa Fe north of the historic plaza and specializes in Post-War American abstract art, featuring both historic and contemporary geometric, hard edged, Op, Pop, color field, minimal and gestural abstraction in a variety of media. The gallery represents many established mid to late-career artists who were part of important art historical movements and tendencies that occurred during the 1950s through the 1980s on both the east and west coasts. The gallery also represents estates, secondary market works, and several emerging artists.