Pink Lady
Image: HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Pink Lady, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 84 1/2 x 58 inches (214.6 x 147.3 cm) © 2014 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler's work organized in collaboration with the newly established Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. This follows the gallery’s critically acclaimed 2013 exhibition, “Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959,” which was organized with the artist's estate.
The exhibition focuses on a brief but critical period in Frankenthaler's career during 1962–63, when she “composed with color” rather than with line, resulting in the freer compositions that came to exemplify her long and prolific career. Transitioning from the sparer, more graphic works of 1960–61, Frankenthaler made paintings that more readily filled the space of the canvas, moving toward what critic B. H. Friedman described as the “total color image” that would become a hallmark of her later work. Included in the exhibition are Cloud Bank, Hommage à M.L., andCool Summer (all 1962), in which she employed a limited number of linear elements, linking them to her innovative stain paintings of the 1950s while marking a new direction with the use of spreading areas of color and a reassessment of the properties of painting materials.
