Opening: ENIGMA: The Works Of George “Skipper” Captain

SUN & DUST and Relay present ENIGMA: An exhibition opening at Relay September 10th 5-8 PM on view through September 26 2026 with special selected works on view at SUN & DUST Sept 2nd through September 30th 2026.
ENIGMA: The Work of George “Skipper” Captain, is the first exhibition of a Santa Fe painter whose art practice of more than four decades was conducted thoroughly on his own terms. Working almost entirely outside public view, Captain (b. 1945, Manhattan, NY; d. 2025, Santa Fe, NM), known to all as “Skipper,” built a practice in unbound dry pigment on paper, alongside charcoal drawing, oil painting, and material work incorporating ground soil, dried grass, and salvaged metal. He had no formal training. His education came from books and from exhibition catalogues carried back from New York in the 1970s. ENIGMA presents more than 150 works across two locations, SUN & DUST and RELAY, the majority of which have never been shown. Captain worked in dry pigment, unbound and pressed or rubbed directly into heavy paper. The method permits little correction. Some of that pigment was purchased. Some was gathered from roadsides north and west of Santa Fe and ground by hand. Many of the sheets present two fields of color and the boundary between them. In a smaller group, that boundary drifts rather than rules, and what it encloses reads as a body rather than hard geometry. Panels built from found matter and compelling detritus carry the earliest dates in the abstract archive. Representational charcoals and oils of considerable skill round out the exhibition. Captain showed publicly only once, at LewAllen Galleries on Galisteo St., where Arlene LewAllen had asked him to exhibit his large charcoal family portraits. He agreed reluctantly, and sold multiple artworks, but never showed publicly again.