HELEN FRANKENTHALER: PAINTING ON PAPER, 1990-2002
Gagosian is pleased to announce Helen Frankenthaler: Painting on Paper, 1990–2002.
September 30 – November 23, 2024
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was one of the most highly regarded American artists of her time. Over her last decade of art making, painting on paper became Frankenthaler’s primary means of expression. “I’ve always worked on paper,” she noted in 1996, “but not conceived on the scale of my canvases. . . . The shift was a tremendous move for me.” The paintings in the exhibition reveal her exploration of the material and compositional possibilities of working on paper: new kinds of chromatic juxtapositions and painterly gestures, often set down on a smoother surface than canvas.
At several earlier moments in her career, Frankenthaler had added more visibly dense brushstrokes and applications of pigment to the revolutionary soak-stain technique she had pioneered in the early 1950s. This approach became a constant in her late compositions. After working directly on the floor during the first four decades of her career, she began painting on large, waist-high tabletops, a concession to her age; the turn to painting on paper also coincided with her increased activity in printmaking.
These works exhibit the range of approaches that Frankenthaler brought to painting on paper. Santa Fe XIII (1990) and New Mexico (1995)—abstractions that recall, respectively, the light-filled skies and sandy vistas of the Southwestern landscape—were inspired by her teaching residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 1990 and 1991. With warm earth tones and variegated greens in layered washes, End of Summer (1995) evokes a sunlit landscape with an application that emphasizes the irregular texture of the handmade paper.
Free-flowing lines of great variety can be seen throughout these works, alternately defining contours and remaining unbounded. An untitled painting from 1994 with a bright yellow ground is defined by linear traces drawn in pastel, colored pencil, and charcoal, accentuated by washes of hot and cool hues that appear animated by elemental interactions.
Another large-scale untitled work from 1996 features softly spreading areas of color resting on a linear horizontal reminiscent of her celebrated 1952 canvas, Mountains and Sea, except for the pencil grid that runs through and around the colors in the later composition.