OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Roger Kuntz was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects into shadowy half-abstractions. Kuntz was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1926, but moved many times as a child, first to Honolulu, then San Francisco to Riverside to Coronado and, finally, to Lomaland. After high school, Kuntz enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, dropped out for two years to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and returned in 1946 to study art and psychology. Upon graduation in 1948, Kuntz enrolled at the Claremont Graduate University, where he earned an MFA in 1950. As Kuntz matured artistically, his paintings evolved from relatively traditional compositions to much more reductive and dramatic views of freeway overpasses and underpasses, cropped highway signs, and signs carved in deep shadow and light; they embodied Kuntz?s search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality. Produced from 1960 to 1962 in a palette generally limited to black, white, grays and greens, these paintings compose his most highly acclaimed body of work. Kuntz lived with his wife and daughter in Laguna Beach until his death in 1975.