ORANGERIE Fine Art Gallery Opens in Palm Springs with an Inaugural Exhibition Anchored by Rex Ray and Jack Early

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Palm Springs, CA — ORANGERIE Fine Art opens February 11 in the Lofts Art District with an inaugural exhibition that announces a new presence in the Southern California art landscape. Organized with the rigor of an institutional exhibition across a main floor and mezzanine, the presentation brings together estate-level work, historical abstraction, and cross-disciplinary image-making through a spatial logic that privileges conviction over accumulation and judgment over synthesis.

 

Anchoring the exhibition are two co-featured artists: Rex Ray (1956–2015, Estate) and Jack Early. Ray’s work—drawn from rare holdings, including material from the artist’s personal collection—reasserts his refined compositional intelligence and singular command of collage as a serious postwar language, one rooted in devotion, repetition, and belief rather than commentary. Early’s practice, which emerged through a series of highly visible New York exhibitions in the 1990s, including institutional and gallery presentations that positioned him within the lineage of postwar American abstraction, and which was later pursued with renewed rigor after a long, deliberate withdrawal, introduces a countervailing force: labor-intensive, emotionally lucid work that blends autobiography, music, and craft into objects shaped by endurance and lived experience. Together, their work establishes a foundation of seriousness and making that resists irony and rewards sustained attention.

 

ORANGERIE’s architecture is integral to the exhibition’s structure. The main floor establishes material presence and weight; the mezzanine, accessed by stairs and overlooking the gallery below, is given entirely to Huntley Muir, whose work is presented as an immersive print cabinet. For the London–Los Angeles duo—long revered across music, theatre, and design, with work held in major international collections and presented by leading cultural institutions—this marks a U.S. gallery debut of contemporary limited-edition prints. The installation frames the images not as décor but as works with lineage, shaped by decades of cross-disciplinary production in opera, stage design, and graphic culture. Elevated physically and conceptually, the mezzanine functions as a quiet counterpoint to the material density below, sharpening the exhibition’s internal rhythm through contrast rather than cohesion.

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Accent works are introduced with deliberate restraint. A single monumental wall construction by Laddie John Dill, whose work is held in major international museum collections and associated with the California Light and Space movement, anchors the gallery’s engagement with postwar Southern California abstraction. Shown concurrently with the inclusion of a neon light work by Dill in a featured curated exhibition at the Intersect Palm Springs Art + Design Fair, running concurrently, the work affirms his institutional stature while resisting spectacle. Two works by Charles Green Shaw (1892–1974)—represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, where he was granted two solo exhibitions during his lifetime—situate early American abstraction within a broader transatlantic lineage, while two large paintings by John Grillo (1917–2014)—a foundational figure in California abstraction whose work is held by the Met, MoMa and National Gallery of Art (USA)—extend the exhibition’s dialogue with material process and painterly structure.

 

A work from Papua New Guinea (Sepik River Basin)—a bark painting—introduces a parallel and foundational lineage. The object, collected in the field in 1973, is presented neither as ethnographic illustration nor as decorative motif, but as historically consequential works whose formal intelligence and ritual gravity operate from belief rather than authorship. The placement acknowledges a long, complex history of aesthetic exchange without collapsing difference, erasing origin, or proposing false equivalence.

 

Taken together, the exhibition articulates a position rather than a theme. ORANGERIE Fine Art opens not as a provisional space, but as a gallery with a fully formed curatorial posture—one that values spatial hierarchy, institutional seriousness, and the confidence to show less. During Modernism Week and the Intersect Art & Design Fair, as Palm Springs becomes a site of intensified attention, ORANGERIE offers an exhibition that assumes an informed audience and rewards those willing to look slowly.

 

Opening and Viewing Information
 

Public Opening Receptions:

- Saturday, February 14, 4-8pm

- Wednesday, February 18, 4–8pm
Lofts Art District Walk: February 12, 4–7pm
Exhibition run: February 11–28
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 1–6pm, or by appointment

 

ORANGERIE Fine Art
610 South Belardo Road, Unit 500
Palm Springs, CA 92264
www.orangeriefineart.com

Press contact:
Jim Landé
310-929-0783