Extended through March 26, 2022
About
The first solo presentation of Helen Frankenthaler’s works to be held in Paris since After Abstract Expressionism, 1959–1962 at Gagosian in 2017, this grouping spans three decades of her painting practice. Two canvases from 1961, Black Shapes on Black and Square Figure, emerged from a pivotal moment in Frankenthaler’s career, a year after her first institutional retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York. They are composed with highly saturated colors imparted by her use of thinned oil paint, together with more graphic linear elements that define an aggregation of autonomous shapes. Painted a decade later, soon after Frankenthaler began spending summers at Shippan Point in Stamford, Connecticut, facing Long Island Sound, Ocean Drive West #1 (1974) conveys both the tranquility and restless movement of the ocean through its lucid blue tones and supple swelling forms. A group of brilliantly hued gestural works on paper from the 1990s exemplifies Frankenthaler’s lifelong exploration of the technical and compositional possibilities of painting.
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In Conversation
Carol Armstrong and John Elderfield
In conjunction with the exhibition Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s at Gagosian in New York, Carol Armstrong and John Elderfield discuss Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings and large-scale works on paper dating from 1990 to 1995.
The Romance of a New Medium: Helen Frankenthaler and the Art of Collaboration
Inspired by the recent retrospective of Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, William Davie writes about the artist’s innovative journey with printmaking. Davie illuminates Frankenthaler’s formative collaborations with master printers Tatyana Grosman and Kenneth Tyler.
In Conversation
Katy Hessel, Matthew Holman, and Eleanor Nairne on Helen Frankenthaler
Broadcaster and art historian Katy Hessel; Matthew Holman, associate lecturer in English at University College London; and Eleanor Nairne, curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, discuss Helen Frankenthaler’s early training, the development of her signature soak-stain technique and subsequent shifts in style, and her connections to the London art world.
Helen Frankenthaler: A Painter’s Sculptures
On the occasion of four exhibitions in London exploring different aspects of Helen Frankenthaler’s work, Lauren Mahony introduces texts by the sculptor Anthony Caro and by the artist herself on her relatively unfamiliar first body of sculpture, made in the summer of 1972 in Caro’s London studio.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.