Ron Linden

In 2016, Los Angeles art critic Mat Gleason wrote, "One Southern California art veteran, Ron Linden, is also curating in the South Bay. His TransVagrant / Warschaw Gallery in San Pedro has hosted exhibitions for almost a decade now, specializing in rigorous, almost scholarly shows, primarily of painting. Be they solo or group shows, Linden’s space has a severe eye for the reductive, the historical and the dedicated. Fearlessly championing Modernist forms and playing the long game with art history, TransVagrant and Warschaw exists in a context free from art world tropes that chase what was on the cover of last month's ArtForum. It is one of the crowning achievements of the South Bay, inspiring and informing the whole scene."

From Mario Naves' article "Picasso's Ghost," about paintings by Ron Linden exhibited at the CUE Foundation, in the New York Observer, January, 2008: "Riddled by the ghosts of Cubism and Pop's cool ironies, painter Ron Linden's milky investigation of surface, space and denuded biomorphism are only nominally sensual paint-as-stuff chases after painting as intellectual pursuit. Mr. Linden's gift is that brainy impatience doesn’t quell a fractured and elusive poetry - if anything it engenders it."

In 1978, Linden received the individual artist's grant in painting from National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1975, Jeff Perone wrote in Artforum magazine about Linden's work in "Both Kinds: Contemporary Art in L.A.": "... Precious objects are precious objects and my personal preferences from Diebenkorn 1945, to Linden 1975 means the same thing; the works resemble each other closely, only Linden's a little more loose in technique and tighter in concept. It does not matter how far the distance traveled, chronologically or psychologically. The new looks like the old, and the good things, new or old, are tradition, as in the new tradition, a tradition that looks good. Linden is expressing himself, goddamnit."

In 1972, Linden relocated to California. He worked as a scenic artist in the Hollywood film industry for 25 years. He helped establish artist communities in Pasadena, downtown Los Angeles and San Pedro, California.

Ron Linden (born 1940, Chicago, Illinois) is a California abstract painter, independent curator, and associate professor of art at Los Angeles Harbor College, Wilmington. He lives and works in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles.