When Maxwell Alexander Gallery opens the doors on its 2024 kick-off show on January 26, it will do so from a new gallery in a new city. The move isn’t far—from Los Angeles to neighboring city Pasadena—but the leap is large.
“We were probably in our second or third year as a gallery, and we knew right away we wanted to buy our own building. We wanted to have a home base for this organic art movement we were starting,” says Beau Alexander, who founded the gallery with his brother, painter Logan Maxwell Hagege. “Anyone who knows anything about real estate in California, especially Los Angeles, knows it’s basically impossible to buy anything, which made it hard to accomplish what we wanted to do.”
Beau Alexander, owner of Maxwell Alexander Gallery, stands amid the ongoing renovation project at the new gallery in Pasadena, California. It will open in January 2024.The gallery started in 2012, first in Culver City, California, and then eventually moved into downtown Los Angeles, just blocks away from the Los Angeles Convention Center and the arena that was home to the Lakers. The space, long and narrow but with high ceilings and great floors, served the gallery well for many years, launching major shows for many of the gallery’s biggest artists—Glenn Dean, Brett Allen Johnson, Eric Bowman, Joshua LaRock, John and Terri Kelly Moyers, Howard Post, Danny Galieote, Hagege and others. But the location was always going to be a temporary home because they were leasing the space. And collectors and visitors were also grumbling, rightfully so, about the lack of parking on a bustling street.
Logan Maxwell Hagege, Mesa, Cloud, Zig Zag, oil, 30”After a huge 10-year birthday bash in October 2022, which saw an impressive turnout of collectors and art fans seemingly bursting the gallery at its seams, Alexander once again turned his attention to the dream that brought pioneers from the East Coast to the West—the promise of owning land and planting a flag in your own soil. An exhaustive search eventually led him to the heart of nearby Pasadena, which immediately spoke to the vibe the gallery was trying to create. “Pasadena is very conducive to Western art. It’s one of the most high-end neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. It has beautiful Spanish architecture and these incredible craftsman and bungalow homes. Nearby is the Huntington Art Museum and the Norton Simon Museum,” Alexander says. “It is also a very small town within a large city, which is what we liked about it.”
Glenn Dean, Shadow Rider, oil, 60 x 40”
Additionally, Pasadena and the immediate vicinity have a great deal of art history: Maynard Dixon and Edgar Payne would kick around the area; Frank Tenney Johnson, Norman Rockwell and others would have studios on the same street, Champion Place in nearby Alhambra; Josephy Henry Sharp died in Pasadena in 1953; and Nancy Russell had Trail’s End, her Spanish-style home in East Pasadena where she lived after the death of her husband, Charles M. Russell. The area is no stranger to Western art.
Of course, art history and real estate are two very different things. “The process of acquiring the property and building in Pasadena was crazy from pretty much the very beginning, all the way through to the end, which was a bidding war with 10 other parties. Somehow, we got it,” Alexander says of the 3,500-square-foot gallery. As the ink dried on the paperwork, the work was far from over as a top-to-bottom renovation was needed to bring the building up to the high standards of the gallery. “It’s going to have high 18-foot ceilings that will create a grandness with clean white walls and design elements incorporated into the façade. It will fit into our vision of presenting Western art in a different fashion for the next generation.”
“And we have a dedicated parking lot, which is very rare for the area,” he adds.
G. Russell Case, Days Adornment, oil, 16 x 20”
Josh Elliott, Roaming Indigo, oil, 28 x 30”
Alexander is confident that the gallery will continue to make its mark on the Western art world from its new, and permanent, location in Pasadena. “I think this move we’re making is a huge testament to the success of not only our gallery and the efforts our artists have put into it, but also the success of the market,” he says. “This solidifies everything together.”
The Grand Re-Opening will start on January 26 through 28, with a series of VIP and public events, including live painting demos with Hagege, T. Allen Lawson and Thomas Blackshear II. There will also be a sale with new works from many of the gallery’s artists, including several new names like George G. Redden, son of Grant Redden.
Phil Epp, Distant Rain, acrylic, 30 x 40”
Works in the show include G. Russell Case’s desert valley scene Days Adornment, showing a single rider tending to a flock of sheep as they pick their way through dry desert vegetation; Len Chmiel’s West I Know – Summarizing Solitude, Utah, of golden hills in Southern Utah; and Josh Elliott’s Roaming Indigo, featuring an immense circular cloud that hangs over the desert floor.
John Moyers, Edge of the Great Divide, oil, 18 x 24”
Billy Schenck, Phaedra’s Canyon, oil, 35 x 45”
Maxwell Alexander Gallery has also been a bastion of contemporary Western art, and that will be seen clearly in the work of David Grossmann, who creates thin lines within a field of golden paint in his work The Way Out. The work is fully abstracted, and yet the image of new aspen trees standing resolute in the warmth of a sunset is immediately seen within his forms. Another artist pushing into modernism more and more often is Phil Epp, who is showing Distant Rain,an image of six wild horses walking in front of an impressive stormfront building on the horizon. Epp is routinely playing with scale as his subjects shrink smaller and his clouds billow forcefully over the prairie.
Len Chmiel, West I Know – Summarizing Solitude, Utah, oil, 32 x 35”
Artists bringing figurative works are Billy Schenck, showing a nude cowgirl disrobing amid towering cliff faces in Phaedra’s Canyon, and Glenn Dean, who will be presenting Shadow Rider, a large 60-inch-tall work of a horse and rider descending a shaded bluff as illuminated cliffs glow in the distance. John Moyers will be offering one of his famous Native American chief paintings, Edge of the Great Divide, which has an intense color palette that suggests hot noon-day light. And finally, Hagege will be represented by Mesa, Cloud, Zig Zag, a round work measuring 30 inches in diameter. The image features a Native American man wrapped in a blanket staring out in the sun. The figure, reflective and calm, seems to be looking into a bright future. —
Grand Re-Opening
January 26-28, 2024
Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Pasadena, CA
(213) 275-1060, www.maxwellalexandergallery.com
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