Lorna Ritz Opens Debut New York Solo Exhibition

“Peonies Done, Roses Begun” 40 X 50” oil on canvas 2025

“I paint the light that the relationships of color finds, specific to the time of day, or the season, that breathes life into the painting. The view from my studio barn doesn’t change, but it’s never the same.” – Lorna Ritz

Lorna Ritz’s (MFA Painting 1971) debut New York solo exhibition is currently on view at YveYang Gallery. Although long celebrated by institutions and U.S. collectors, Lorna Ritz: Paintings marks her first major gallery show in New York.

The exhibition features never-before-seen paintings spanning two decades, all created in her studio barn overlooking the mountains, trees, and wide-open fields of bucolic Western Massachusetts. Lorna Ritz: Paintings will be on view through August 16, 2025.

Ritz trained under James Gahagan—a Hans Hofmann student whom PBS once called “one of the most skillful American colorists”—Ritz carries forward a lineage of postwar abstraction rarely granted to women of her generation. She has painted with total commitment for decades, largely outside the commercial art world—a path shared by many women artists of her generation, whose contributions are only now being recognized.

Ritz taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, the University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and her work is held in the collections of the Cedars-Sinai Collection, the Aidron Duckworth Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Provincetown Art Museum.

Learn More:

Lorna Rita: Paintings – YveYang Gallery

Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art