“A Legacy of Painting” from four UNL artists examines the lines between abstraction and landscape

L. Kent Wolgamott

Legacy of Painting: Examining Four Perspectives” is, on one level, a survey of painting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln over the last 50 years, showcasing the work of three professors and a student.

But the Kiechel Fine Arts exhibition is also, intriguingly, an examination of the intersection of landscape and abstraction, a division that is blurred even in the most “landscape” of any of the paintings on view.

The four painters are: Dan Howard, who began his 22-year UNL teaching career in 1974; Keith Jacobshagen, who taught at the school for 40 years before his 2008 retirement; Aaron Holz, now professor of art (painting and drawing); and Chad Olsen, who studied with Holz and Jacobshagen, beginning his painting career in 2010.

Howard, whose paintings combine realistic elements within their abstraction that’s rooted in ‘50s action painting, and landscape master Jacobshagen are among Nebraska’s most decorated and widely recognized artists, with work held in museums and private collections throughout the country.

Holz, whose work uses landscape form underlying symbolic abstraction, has received distinguished teaching awards, and Olsen, who after a stay in New York, now works his minimalist abstraction in Kearney.

The quartet are all impressive painters, and the show can be viewed simply as a showcase for some of the work from, in the cases of Jacobshagen and Howard, the 1990s through paintings done this year.

For Jacobshagen, the 2024 painting is “The Weather Change,” a view of a darkening sky over a large grain elevator, green fields and tree line low on the horizon, seemingly landscape at its purest.

But cover up the bottom of the painting and the sky becomes abstract, a study of feathery forms, layers of color and lines that move the eye across the painting, some lifting to the light at the top of the canvas, some downward into darker regions. Olsen’s paintings, the most purely abstract of the quartet, function in an opposite manner.

The large “Take my heart when you go,” for example, lacks any direct landscape referents. But its black foregrounds, dynamic spray of white in the center and rich blue field in the upper right corner combine to suggest a wave crashing against rocks.

The yellow-orange and blue shooting upward in “Nightfall” suggest the Northern Lights. It is, however, hard to find an earthbound landscape connection in this 2024 painting. Rather “Somewhere you’ll be there, Bury me, In the way out, In the past” could, at best, suggest outer space. But it’s a delicate abstraction, carried by a delicate, diagonal white field in its center.

Howard and Holz blur the lines even more in their work.

Howard’s giant “Lancaster Vantages/Eight” is as direct a landscape as he has created, a view of a small town intersection with a STOP sign in the center, abstractions found only in small passages.

But “Fashions in the Abstract: Thirty Five,” taken from a 2014-15 series rooted in fashion photography, reveals something tangible – a row of buttons on a sleeve – that floats in a dark blue passage in the heavily impastoed painting that demonstrates Howard’s mastery of paint handling, color and dynamic line.

Holz also has one primarily figurative work, an exquisitely rendered rose that hovers over a watery reflection in “Spring Bloom.” But the remainder of his paintings are highly complicated abstractions that utilize vague landscape as the basis for studies in depth, perspective, color, symbol and motion. The latter is provided by small triangles that appear to be flying back and forth across the canvases.

That latter sensibility is at its strongest in “Spring Flood,” his 2024 painting, which cuts down the number of triangles, increasingly animating the surface over a layered mix of greens and blues that are, unquestionably, abstracted landscape.

The painters’ takes on landscape and abstraction give credence the exhibition’s subtitle, providing four perspectives on painting, honed over a half century by the UNL artists, thereby creating a legacy of painting from artists connected with the university, who for decades have been the anchors of art in Lincoln.