Jane Freilicher: Abstractions
Kasmin Gallery, New York
March 2 - April 22, 2023
Montego Bay, 1961
Oil on linen, 68 1/2 x 61 3/4 inches, 174 x 156.8 cm
© The Estate of Jane Freilicher, courtesy of Kasmin
The first exhibition in over fifteen years to focus on Jane Freilicher’s rarely-seen large-scale abstractions will go on view at Kasmin. Demonstrating the expansiveness of Freilicher’s visual language and underscoring her contribution to a generation of New York City painters, Abstractions offers an opportunity to discover a series of work by an artist known primarily for her distinctive style of painterly representation. This is the third solo exhibition of work by Jane Freilicher to be staged at Kasmin, and it will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring an introduction by Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, and an essay by writer and scholar Erin Kimmel.
The exhibition presents a group of paintings in degrees of abstraction, realized by Jane Freilicher between 1958 and 1962, a period of great inventiveness when the artist was spending stretches of time in Long Island but had yet to establish a studio there. The series marks a crucial moment of discovery and focus for Freilicher, who went on to integrate the freedom, fluidity, and confidence developed during this period into her more recognizable still lifes and landscapes of later decades.
Jane Freilicher’s abstractions have their roots in observation, informed by her studies with legendary abstract painter Hans Hofmann at his schools in New York and Provincetown. In this group of paintings, pastoral landscapes from Water Mill, Long Island, are translated through the lens of the artist’s memory into confident gestural compositions defined by their use of color and sensitive depiction of light. In a 2006 interview for The New York Sun, the artist tells writer Jennifer Samet of this evolutionary moment in her practice: “I remember being overwhelmed by aqueous light and the obliteration of the horizon by fog.” [1] Jane Freilicher’s palette returns repeatedly here to a combination of off-white and light blue, rendered in loose brushwork across an expansive pictorial space to give a palpable impression of the airy, open landscape of the country.
Breaking out of the domestic scale necessitated by previous studio spaces, this generative period saw Jane Freilicher regularly visiting Water Mill and then returning to her Manhattan studio where she would collapse the formal elements of the rural and coastal environments into energetic, improvisational paintings that were significantly larger than her earlier works. While approaching pure abstraction, the paintings from this period retain a compositional recognition of their ordering principles—the horizon line, a boat’s mast, the position of the sun in the sky, and, in the artist’s words, “long vistas of clouds and water.” [2]
The metamorphosis of landscapes that figure prominently in the artist’s life are representative of, as Roberta Smith identified in 2006, “a more personal, grounded version of Color Field painting.” [3] This observation bridges Jane Freilicher to a loose group of contemporaries whose considerations of their immediate environments brought great warmth and aliveness to varying shades of abstraction—Milton Avery, Etel Adnan, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, and Willem de Kooning (whose own abstract landscapes inspired by his time on Long Island went on view at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959).
Jane Freilicher’s (1924–2014) work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; among many others. Her paintings were selected for inclusion in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Recent acquisitions have been made by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; and Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI.
1. Jennifer Samet, “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman,” The New York Sun (March 30, 2006): 25.
2. Jennifer Samet, “Portraits of the Artist,” 25.
3. Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Jane Freilicher,” The New York Times (April 14, 2006): E32.
KASMIN GALLERY
509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
