Eugene Newmann

Eugene Newmann has long been regarded as one of the pioneering artists in the Santa Fe art scene. Newmann’s paintings hover between abstraction and figuration. If there ever was a clear distinction between those genres in his work, it has disappeared — after all, most contemporary art seems to blur those lines by definition. Newmann, who received a 2008 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, is self-taught. Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now the capital of Slovakia), in 1936, he grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia (Spanish is his first language), and New York City. In the 1950s he attended the University of Chicago, getting his bachelor’s degree in 1957.

In 1972 Newmann and his wife, the artist Dana Newmann, moved to Northern New Mexico from California’s Monterey Peninsula.