Spotlight

Gregory Kondos | 1923 - 2021

Gregory Kondos, who was born in 1923 and passed away in March of this year shortly before his 98th birthday, was recognized as a virtuosic landscape painter not only in his hometown of Sacramento, but around the world. Influenced by Impressionist masters like Cézanne and Gaugin, he dedicated his life to capturing the natural world in luminous, sweeping paintings that, in the words of Crocker Art Museum chief curator Scott Shields, “celebrate the terrain’s inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself.” Kondos’s close friend, fellow Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud, called Kondos’s intuitive, unfettered technique “a kind of brush dancing.”