Alex Couwenberg: Highline - Digital Exhibition Catalog & Video is Now Available

Alex couwenberg: Highline (70-Pages Fully illustrated print catalog available october 20)

A 70-Page Exhibition Catalog Available Soon - Contact Gallery to Reserve a Copy

Couwenberg’s work taps into the visual rhythms of Southern California, where headlights and taillights play a noir contrapuntal beat to sunlight skittering across waves or filtering in gentle patterns through window blinds on a summer morning. In fact, Couwenberg likens his process to navigating a city: full of green lights, stop signs, and unexpected turns and views. This interplay between control and spontaneity animates the work, producing compositions that simultaneously convey tension and resolution. The resulting pieces are both formally rigorous and emotionally resonant—vivid reflections of an artist deeply attuned to the aesthetics of movement, light, and the layered complexity of memory and lived experience.

Born and based in Southern California, Couwenberg channels the contradictory dialectics of the region: the soft luminosity of ocean vistas and open sky versus the relentless linearity of urban freeway systems. His method—a reductive and additive layering ritual—recalls an abstract archaeology: excavated textures meet precise hard‑edge forms in a personal vernacular built from cultural signifiers and industrial gestures.

A graduate of Art Center College of Design and Claremont Graduate School, Couwenberg studied with Karl Benjamin, a pivotal figure in defining Southern California’s hard‑edge abstraction. Other influences are deeply woven into Couwenberg’s practice as well, ranging from the Finish Fetish movement—surfboard, custom‑car gloss, resin surfaces created with industrial rigor—to Light & Space’s subtle manipulations of perception. Couwenberg’s work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Lancaster Museum of Art & History, Laguna Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, and the Daum Museum of Art in Missouri. In 2007, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting.

Scot Heywood Exhibition

SCOT HEYWOOD

Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Scot Heywood has been investigating geometric abstraction for over forty years. “I painted flat from the get-go,” Heywood says, who has explored abstraction throughout the course of his artistic career. A self-taught artist, Heywood’s works are indebted to the origins of geometric abstraction. In the late 1970s, Heywood fell in love with the paintings of Piet Mondrian and John McLaughlin; since then, he has been translating the austere philosophy of geometric abstraction into his own monochromatic works. 

Ranging in scale from intimate to encompassing, his paintings consist of multiple, colored canvases, connected in staggered, patchwork patterns. In a seemingly endless array of variations, he inserts thin strips between, or attaches them to the sides of, square and rectangular canvases, intentionally misaligning them to create delightfully disruptive, staccato visual rhythms. Heywood is interested in the relationship between wall, work, and viewer, and in the rich dialogue between color and form.

Heywood has shown extensively in Southern California since the late 1970’s at such as significant galleries as Patricia Faure Gallery, Frank Lloyd Gallery, ACE Contemporary Exhibitions and Subliminal Projects Gallery. His work has been featured in dozens of solo shows, and is often included in significant group exhibitions at The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute and Otis College of Art & Design. Heywood’s work has been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant, LA Weekly and Artweek. His paintings are also represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Frederick Weisman Foundation. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.