The paintings of Wilbur Niewald have a deep and persistent connection to his lifetime home of Kansas City, and in a larger sense, to the history of painting itself. After developing a unique abstract language for his paintings in the fifties and sixties, Niewald began to paint in the representational style in 1970, and has continued exclusively in that vein in the decades since. His timeless still lifes, studio portraits, and landscapes are invariably executed through direct observation in an untiring endeavor to render familiar scenes with new clarity through repetition. Niewald’s devotion to his craft, and to the tradition of painting, is axiomatic in the 24 works included in Recent Paintings, which travels here from a recent run at the New York Studio School - his first at that institution in 22 years.