Leo Valledor (1936 – 1989) was a San Francisco-born, New York-based abstractionist and founding member of downtown Manhattan’s trailblazing Park Place Gallery. The space was an iconoclastic artist collective and exhibition venue founded by ten emerging artists, including Valledor, many of which are now recognized as among the most influential Modernists in American history, including Dean Fleming, Mark di Suvero, and Robert Grosvenor, among others. It was a space for collaborative experimentation where the cohort advanced what became genre-defining techniques of geometric abstraction and new concepts of space. It provided a venue to show their friends, also then- emerging, now-iconic artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd, and more.

Playing with dimensionality and flatness, Valledor used geometry to shape the canvas, employing optical illusions or unusually shaped canvases to engage the wall space. Contextualized through the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Leon Polk Smith, and Frank Stella, Valledor’s work was in the vanguard of the color- field and minimalist aesthetics, but is characterized by a unique use of space, shape, and color. Inspired by jazz music, Valledor often connected his work to a myriad of broader cultural and personal references through the titles of his pieces. At the age of nineteen, Valledor had his first solo show, Compositions, featuring his expressionist “Black and Blue Series” at the historic Six Gallery in San Francisco. The artist has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Valledor’s works are in collections across the country from The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to the Seattle Art Museum.

Image: Leo Valledor with his painting ‘Echo’ (for John Coltrane), 1967. Park Place, The Gallery of Art Research, Inc. records and Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1961-2006. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.