Counterparts

About this event

Painters of the Southwest, 1918 to 2026

The Owings Gallery on Palace, 100 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe

November 6 through December 11, 2026

Santa Fe, New Mexico. Alfred Morang painted the Sangre de Cristos from the edge of Santa Fe in 1944 on a small board, and Frank Croft painted the same range in evening light in 2001 on a canvas twice the size, and the two hang together because the subject is the same and nothing else about them is. Counterparts, opening at The Owings Gallery on Palace on Friday, November 6, hangs thirty-two works in sixteen pairs, a painter from the first half of the last century beside a painter working now, the two of them before the same mountain, canyon, church or pueblo, fifty to a hundred years apart.

The pairs follow the landscape. Charles Craig's blue door at Cochiti, painted about 1900, meets Logan Maxwell Hagege's two riders coming up to a pueblo wall, painted last year on jute. William Penhallow Henderson's pastel of a Santa Clara man, from about 1920, hangs opposite William Acheff's Young Taos Maiden of 1995, and the people in both were painted in villages that were old when the painters' grandparents were born. Oscar Berninghaus painted the church at Isleta on a canvas board in 1919, and Frank Croft painted one near Peñasco this year.

Other pairs are kinds of looking rather than places. Gene Kloss's etching of a Taos morning after snow, from 1947, hangs beside Dean Mitchell's watercolor of snow hills, and Howard Cook's Animal Dance, a pastel from about 1918, beside Tony Abeyta's Congregation of the Cats in charcoal and ink wash, finished last year. Will Shuster's two teepees in an evening meadow hang beside Michael Coleman's camp at dusk. Arthur Dove's small gouache of August 1941, dated in his hand, hangs beside Linda Lynch's Hidden Cycle of 2023, pastel and graphite on cotton paper, the one pair in the exhibition that is not a place at all.

One pair is a painting and an object. José Benito Ortega carved and painted his Nuestra Señora de la Soledad in the Mora valley about 1895, and Frank Croft painted Our Lady of Sorrows on gessoed board in 2002. They stand together by the door, the oldest thing in the exhibition and one of the newest, a century apart before the same sorrowing figure.

"Arthur Dove painted that small gouache on the twentieth of August, 1941, and wrote the date on it, and Linda Lynch made Hidden Cycle eighty-two years later in a studio an hour from here," said Nat Owings, the gallery's founder. "Hang them side by side and the Dove looks as though it had been waiting for her. If a pair had to come home with me, it would be that one."

The earlier half of the exhibition comes from the inventory The Owings Gallery has carried for more than forty years, and the later half are the painters it shows now. Present Company, portraits from the Taos and Santa Fe studios, opens the same day at The Owings Gallery on Marcy, 120 East Marcy Street.

Counterparts opens Friday, November 6, 2026, at 100 East Palace Avenue and is on view through Friday, December 11. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 5, and Sunday, 12 to 5, with no charge for admission. Contact: Laura Widmar, Director, 505-982-6244, lwidmar@owingsgallery.com. Photographs of the works are available on request.