Iria Leino @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - An undeservedly forgotten and undervalued artistic estate

Iria Leino

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

March 28 – May 4, 2025

Galerie Forsblom has been granted the rare opportunity to explore an undeservedly forgotten and undervalued artistic estate in which history is palpably present. The gallery presents an exhibition featuring IRIA LEINO, a pioneer of the 1960s New York art scene and a figure enigmatic to contemporary audiences.

Iria Leino (1932-2022) was a Helsinki-born artist and fifties supermodel who made her mark as a pioneer of abstract art. At the height of her international modelling career, she left the fashion world to settle in New York’s SoHo, where she forged an exceptional career as an abstract expressionist. Her artistic journey reflected the cultural and artistic upheavals of New York in the 1960s.

Iria Leino combines the influences of Color Field painting with a meditative style of brushwork. After surviving a serious accident in 1968, she turned to Buddhism, which added a spiritual dimension to her artistic practice. Exemplifying this spiritualism is The Elephant Series, in which elephants symbolize wisdom and enlightenment. Leino’s exhibitions were well received by contemporary critics, who praised her innovative, norm-defying style of abstract expressionism.

Iria Leino’s meditative approach to painting is epitomized by The Dreamings Series (1988-1989), in which spiritual dimensions are invoked by colorful arches and dotted details. Leino was a reclusive figure whose one-of-a-kind serial oeuvre owes its existence to her dedication to solitude and spiritual guidance. Leino fused elements of Finnish nature and design with the traditions of American abstract expressionism to create an enduring legacy that is unique in art history.

Iria Leino surrendered herself to a life of solitude, meditation, and the guidance of a spiritual guru, enabling her to perfect her idiom through steadfast dedication to painting serially. By interweaving cross-cultural influences – Finnish nature and design with American traditions of abstraction – she created an unprecedented legacy shared by Finland and the United States.

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Iria Leino: 1968–1970, Harper's, New York, September 4 – October 19, 2024

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Sam Gilliam @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "The Flow of Color" Exhibition

Sam Gilliam: The Flow of Color

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 10 – March 29, 2025

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

March 7 – April 19, 2025

Pace presents a two-part exhibition of work by Sam Gilliam at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. This show brings together watercolors and Drape paintings created by the artist in the last several years of his life, between 2018 and 2022. 

Widely recognized as one of the boldest innovators of postwar American painting, Sam Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. Drawing inspiration from the use of color, line, and movement in Renaissance painting—in addition to the long history of formalism in modernist art—the artist nurtured a radical vision for his work that transcended the traditional boundaries of painting and sculpture, gesturing toward a new mode of making that would come to be understood as installation. Through his tireless experimentations with technique, gesture, materiality, color, and space, he continually reinvented his practice, pursuing a lifelong inquiry into the expressive, aesthetic, and philosophical powers of abstraction.

A series of formal breakthroughs early in his career resulted in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Sam Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. “The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination,” the artist once said. “Something was in the air, and it was in that spirit that I did the Drape paintings.” Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Tate in London; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, among many others.

Notably, Sam Gilliam cultivated ties to both Seoul and Tokyo during his lifetime. From 1956 to 1958, when he served  as a company clerk in the US army, he was stationed at a base in Yokohama, Japan, visiting nearby art galleries, stores, and woodcut studios whenever he had the time. Also traveling to Tokyo during this period, Sam Gilliam had his first encounter with the work of Yves Klein, a formative experience that, combined with his exposure to Japanese art and architecture, marked “a beginning of when I finally became an artist,” as he once put it. 

“Japan was just marvelous,” Sam Gilliam said in a 2016 interview. “There was one person in our unit who did nothing but go to Kabuki theater. From what I had seen of the art world, I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to be an artist, but I knew I didn’t want to be a soldier. So, I grew up. I went back to school to do my thesis.” 

Decades later, in 1991, the artist presented his first solo show in Seoul at the Walker Hill Arts Center and gave a lecture at the Daegu American Cultural Center as a participant in an arts exchange initiative organized by the United States Information Service (USIS). His work would return to the Korean capital for another major solo exhibition at Pace’s gallery in 2021. 

Pace’s Gilliam exhibition across these two cities sheds light on the artist’s late-career experimentations with form, material, and process. The last years of his life were marked by intense creativity, adding new dimensions to the formal breakthroughs that had first brought him acclaim six decades earlier. 

The Drape works included in Pace’s exhibition in Asia—all of which date to 2018—trace the artist’s late-career experimentations with texture, color, scale, and materiality through his use of Cerex nylon. Employing distinctive soaking, staining, pouring, folding, and spattering techniques, he created totalizing, entrancing compositions with seemingly illimitable contours of color and shape. These Drapes are suspended from the ceiling with a single cord, allowing the viewer to experience them in the round, as active features in a transformed environment, emphasizing the newfound luminosity Gilliam achieved as he continued to discover new energy in this career-defining form. 

Like his Drapes, the artist began producing rich watercolor abstractions on Japanese washi paper in the 1960s. The techniques that he used in these works—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. Through this medium, he came to understand color and form as physical, textural presences that reach beyond painting’s two-dimensional surface. 

In his later watercolors, color and support became increasingly inseparable: the paper became the color rather than simply serving as its conveyer or carrier. The sense of depth in the creases and folds of his Drapes is also echoed in his watercolors. Vertical washes of color on these flattened surfaces create the illusion of folds or pleats, and planes of light and dark colors bleed into one another. Saturating the paper support with luminous pigment, Sam Gilliam transformed his watercolor compositions into objects rather than images. 

Concurrent with the run of its Sam Gilliam show in Seoul and Tokyo, Pace presents an exhibition of work by another key Washington Color School painter, Kenneth Noland, at both gallery locations. 

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; d. 2022, Washington D.C.) was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Sam Gilliam transformed his medium and the context in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Sam Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

PACE TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com

Kenneth Noland @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "Paintings 1966 - 2006" Exhibition

Kenneth Noland

Paintings 1966 - 2006

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 10 – March 29, 2025

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

March 7 – April 19, 2025

Pace presents a two-part survey of work by American painter Kenneth Noland at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. These two distinct presentations of rare, museum-quality paintings bring together works created between the 1960s and early 2000s, encompassing the artist’s most celebrated series. This is the first exhibition dedicated to Noland’s work in both countries in some 30 years.

A founding member of the Washington Color School—which included Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Alma Thomas among others—Kenneth Noland was instrumental in forging the language of postwar abstraction in the US. His experimental approach to form and color gave rise to radical works that redefined the medium of painting. Between 1946 and 1948, Kenneth Noland studied at Black Mountain College in his native North Carolina. There, he was exposed to the ideas of seminal figures such as Josef Albers and John Cage, developing an early interest in the expressive potential of color and chance. As his style matured, the artist would continue to treat color as a resonant force in his abstractions, which feature circles, chevrons, and other geometric forms.

“By 1960, Ken Noland had become an artist of the first rank, often great, and a primary force in the development of abstract art,” the late curator William Agee, who knew Noland personally, wrote in a 2014 essay accompanying Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work in New York. “His was from start to finish an art of color, part of a long tradition that dates in the modern era to Impressionism, runs through Cézanne and Matisse, into the 20th century…”

Eminent critics and artists also lauded Noland’s work, with Donald Judd affirming in 1965, “By now Kenneth Noland’s salience isn’t debatable; he’s one of the best painters.”

Pace survey of Kenneth Noland’s work in Asia presents a full picture of his practice, featuring marquee paintings from his Stripe, Shape, Plaid, Chevron, Diamond, Flares, Doors, Mysteries, and Into the Cool series. The earliest paintings in the exhibition include Stripe and Diamond works he produced in the mid and late 1960s, when a new visual language emerged from his early Circles from the 1950s. These horizontally-oriented Stripe and Diamond paintings stretch across several meters beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision, evoking the feel of a vast, enveloping landscape. Kenneth Noland would use an array of techniques to apply bands of color in specific proportions—including staining the raw canvas or using a traditional paint roller—to create textural variation. With his use of acrylic paint, which cannot be reworked as easily as oil, Noland embraced the risk factor, quipping that he was a “one-shot painter.” Regardless of the technique he employed in his painting practice, Noland intentionally removed traces of his hand to focus attention on the materiality of the works while also allowing for chance reactions where bands of paint meet.

At the start of the 1970s, Noland began painting vertical stripes over his horizontal bands. The resulting works, his Plaid paintings, draw parallels with the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an early influence on Noland via his Black Mountain College teacher Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of the De Stijl philosophy. But unlike Mondrian, Noland retained the soft blur ofstained canvas in his lines, cultivating a quasi-alchemical effect as colors overlap and knit together.

In the ensuing years—when Kenneth Noland was the center of a community of artists in Bennington, Vermont that also included Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro—he turned his attention to the canvas support itself. By creating shaped paintings that took unusual, asymmetrical forms, Kenneth Noland emphasized the objecthood of the painting. These works, with their large expanses of a single color, have a textural richness resulting from the paint’s interaction with the raw canvas and the artist’s distinct and often uneven application.

Chevron paintings from the mid-1980s in Pace’s exhibition refer to a pattern and shape that Kenneth Noland first began exploring in the 1960s but attest to a new concern with texture. In these later Chevron paintings, vertical v-shapes contain a range of colors applied in various depths, thick and thin, creating nuanced textural qualities on their surfaces.

Kenneth Noland’s melding of color and shape is also evident in his Flares series, the first body of work he conceived and executed in California, from the early 1990s. These paintings are especially innovative for their incorporation of colorful and translucent plexiglass strips. Wedged between the irregularly shaped panels of each work, these glossy bands activate a complex interplay between color, material, and form. To Noland, the Flares were “constructed pictures” with “separate component parts,” relating them to both collage and sculpture. He further enhanced the objecthood of the Flares by painting their sides in colors that do not match their frontal surfaces.

Small-scale Doors paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s in Pace’s show offer a more intimate experience of Noland’s abstractions, while Mysteries works from the early 2000s—composed of concentric or horizontal bands of varying width and color—harken back to his early Circles. By 2001, the artist had moved from Santa Barbara, California to Port Clyde, Maine, and the landscape and light of the East Coast captured his imagination and influenced his work in new ways.

The latest works in the survey, dating to 2006, are from Noland’s Into the Cool series. These joyous compositions speak to the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and form, reflecting the artist’s enduring love of jazz in their jaunty, gestural abstractions. Though he returned to the image of the circle in his Into the Cool paintings, Kenneth Noland approached color through subtle tone and transparency, moving away from the hard-edge style of his earlier work.

Up until his last works, Kenneth Noland continued pushing his investigations of color and shape to new limits. Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, among many others.

Pace’s Noland survey is the first presentation dedicated to his work to be mounted in Seoul since 1995, when he exhibited at Gana Art Gallery, and the first in Tokyo since 1986, when he showed at Satani Gallery.

Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine), a key figure in the development of postwar abstract art, studied under Ilya Bolotowsky at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1948, developing an early interest in the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and geometric form. A commitment to line and color can be traced throughout his oeuvre—one essential to the development of Color-field painting—beginning with his Circle paintings and extending through a visual language that includes chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid patterns, and shaped canvases. Often adhering to a compositional format, Noland worked methodically within a series to explore color, material, and method—a working process that generated successive forms.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

PACE TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com

Iria Leino @ Harper's, New York - First exhibition from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist Iria Leino (1932–2022)

Iria Leino: 1968–1970

Harper's, New York

September 4 – October 19, 2024

Harper’s presents Iria Leino: 1968–1970, the first solo exhibition from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist IRIA LEINO (1932–2022). The exhibition features a selection of nine historic paintings at Harper’s Chelsea 512, marking the posthumous discovery of a virtually unknown artist who created a prolific body of work in solitude for over 40 years. 

In her lifetime, Iria Leino rarely engaged with the gallery system. The artist instead opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, seeing her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a commercial endeavor. This presentation highlights the first two series that sparked her lifelong exploration of acrylic paint’s viscosity across a range of styles: the Color Field series and the Buddhist Rain series. Several of Leino’s Buddhist Rain pieces are included in the gallery’s booth at The Armory Show from September 5–8, 2024. These presentations offer the public a chance to experience Leino’s paintings for the very first time, half a century after they were produced.

Iria Leino was born in Finland in 1932 and completed her degree at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. Immersed in both painting and fashion during her student years, she moved to Paris after graduation to continue her training at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Leino became a fashion correspondent to supplement her studies in this pivotal time, reporting on the latest trends emerging from the city’s avant-garde cultural scene. With her striking high cheekbones and piercing blue-green eyes, she caught the attention of the late Madame Grès—the queen of haute couture—and Karl Lagerfeld, who launched her career as a model. Leino then set aside her brush to grace the runways of Europe as the supermodel IRIA, walking for major fashion houses such as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin, and popularizing a hairstyle known as nouvelle vague. Despite being embraced by the world of luxury, she suffered immensely throughout this period, struggling with an eating disorder and enduring various mental health challenges driven by the industry’s unsustainable beauty standards. At the peak of her success in 1964, she suddenly abandoned her modeling career and settled in a gritty SoHo loft among New York City’s bohemian community, more than 3,500 miles from the capital of couture. This dramatic transition marked the beginning of Leino’s ascetic life as a dedicated abstract painter.

Soon after relocating to New York, Iria Leino began to cultivate her distinctive language of abstraction at The Art Students League under the guidance of Larry Poons. She juxtaposed brilliant primary colors in dynamic arrangements within her deeply gestural practice, responding to the charged compositions produced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Leino’s improvisational approach to color and form was driven by her desire to fully express herself through painting and nothing else—a commitment to the medium that echoed the philosophical provocations of the New York School. While the work she created at The Art Students League demonstrated that she was already a natural talent, it was a health crisis that would catalyze her unique vision.

In 1968, Iria Leino suffered a severe head injury that left her in a coma for weeks. This event profoundly impacted her art practice, provoking her to reassess her aesthetic direction. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she learned from her faith into her formal studio experiments. Favoring the contemplative nature of pure color and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino dedicated several years to developing dozens of immersive color field and lyrically abstract paintings. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 encompasses some of the most compelling examples from this moment of creative innovation.

Within both the Color Field and the Buddhist Rain series, Leino’s sweeping expanses of warm and cool acrylic pigments subtly evoke the landscape, cosmos, and Earth’s fauna in their abstract forms. The artist’s methodical process involved staining unprimed canvases with ethereal hues by spraying, pouring, and splattering the paint directly onto the surface—all without the use of a brush. In the Buddhist Rain series, these prismatic fields of color were then layered with delicate pastel markings, executed with meticulous precision. Across these luminous works, hundreds of thin, diagonal strokes extend to infinity as they cascade down radiant washes of color. In Kevainen Lampi (Spring Pond), glowing orange tones encircle the edge of the frame, drawing all energy toward the center as the shades bleed into swaths of sage and yellow, while bands of emerald and ivory dashes trickle across the composition. In the painting Explosive Thunder, she takes a more all-over approach, with amber and saffron pastel striations gently fading into fields of green.

For the Color Field series, the artist incorporated multifaceted styles, openly experimenting with different media and techniques. Leino began to use aerosol and other staining methods in her compositions to reveal the interplay between broad areas of acrylic paint on her surfaces. At times, she sprayed pigments with varying intensities over pastel or colored pencil tracings, while on other occasions, she rubbed layering blotches into the cotton fibers to conjure organic forms. The pulsing gradients of orange and golden hues softly coat vascular lines in Balloons #4, while a tear-shaped black stain seems to penetrate a crimson sphere in Eyes Apple. In both paintings, Leino appears to reference the body at the cellular level, while also alluding to the works of early modernist artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that abstract manifestations of the physical world could capture the spiritual dimensions of our inner selves.

Iria Leino’s vigorous manipulation of acrylic pigment was particularly significant in this formative period of the 20th century: the water-based medium was relatively new and not favored by artists at the time. The paint’s viscous nature and ability to dehydrate quickly without the oily blemishes associated with dried linseed paint offered exponential opportunities for formal exploration. Like her peers in the second generation of the New York School—Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and her former teacher, Larry Poons—Leino was a pioneer in the turn towards lyrical abstraction, inviting acrylic paint to inform the terms of this nascent artistic vocabulary. 

Although Iria Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition. Iria Leino would continue to experiment with color and repetitive mark-making within her oeuvre until her death in 2022. Through her process-based works, which she approached with the discipline required by meditation itself, the artist found spiritual and emotional liberation beyond the confines of the official art world. For, in her mind, the competitive industry of visual culture was all too similar to the fashion milieu she left behind. During her lifetime, Leino’s body of work remained hidden from the public eye, staged like frozen opera in the time capsule of her loft. Despite her withdrawal from the limelight, the artist sustained a momentous yet silent dialogue with her generation. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 pays homage to this undiscovered painter, shedding light on her incisive contributions to the history of postwar abstraction.

HARPER'S CHELSEA 512

512 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.harpersgallery.com

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018 @ Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018

Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

April 26 - July 1, 2022

Barbara Mathes Gallery presents Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018. Featuring works by Ed Clark, Thomas Downing, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Charles Hinman and Kenneth Noland, the exhibition explores the history of the Color Field movement and its legacy in the 21st Century. From the 1960s onwards, a generation of American artists began to rethink postwar gestural abstraction. Retaining an interest in color, artists such as Ed Clark, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing began to experiment with framing and shaped canvases, while Sam Gilliam and Charles Hinman abandoned the traditional frame altogether, breaking the boundaries between the space of the painting and the space of the viewer. Driven by technical innovation, the artists presented here expand the definitions of their medium while exploring the effects of light and luminous color.

Experimentation with color and the question of the frame were central concerns of Ed Clark. In the 1960s Clark became the first artist to exhibit a shaped canvas which appeared in a group exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York. Ed Clark was already known for his rethinking of gestural abstraction: in the 1950s he began to apply paint with a push broom, a technique he termed “the big sweep.” In Untitled (1996) Ed Clark reinterprets the oval forms that had preoccupied him in his early canvases, presenting curved shapes not as virtuosic brushstrokes, but rather as glowing clouds of atmospheric color.

Ceaseless invention is a hallmark of Sam Gilliam’s career. In his canonical Drape series, begun in 1968, he suspended unstretched canvases from the walls and ceiling. Freeing the canvas from its frame allowed Gilliam to push the boundaries between painting and sculpture while establishing the artist as leading innovator in the Color Field movement. In B Series II (2015) Gilliam uses pigment-based ink on handmade paper, manipulating the material to create sharp vertical folds within which the luminous pigment pools and smears. Gilliam cites Jazz as an influence and the tension between improvisation and structure –between the ink’s liquidity and the linear structure of the paper’s folds—is characteristic of his experiments with media.

The picture frame was of equal interest to Kenneth Noland, an artist who defined the “post-painterly abstraction” of a generation that reacted against the gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism. A key member of the Washington Color School, Kenneth Noland reduced his compositions to geometric shapes such as circles, chevrons, and lines which he painted on unprimed canvases. Through these simple forms he explored geometry and color relationships. In Walk (1964) he plays with the limits of the frame – turning the painting on its side and both echoing and mirroring its corners in spare ninety-degree angles.

BARBARA MATHES GALLERY

22 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.barbaramathesgallery.com

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Thomas Downing Paintings 1961 – 1975 at Loretta Howard Gallery, New York

Thomas Downing Paintings 1961 – 1975

Loretta Howard Gallery, New York

November 11 - December 19, 2015

Thomas Downing was a key member of the Washington Color School along with Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Howard Mehring. Like Noland and Louis, the artist stained the surfaces of his unprimed canvases directly with acrylic paint in order to attain a completely flat surface. Thomas Downing is best known for his use of dots – arranged in circles and grids – as a compositional device. His work was most directly influenced by the formalism and color theory of Josef Albers.

“In the beginning…it [the circle] was a matter of preference – they seemed right for me.. But I’ve found out some things since then which are why I have continued to make circles. One of these is a remarkable thing about color: that it can move while being still.” [Interview with Leslie Judd Alexander, The Washington Post, 1962].

Works by Thomas Downing are included in the permanent collection of several institutions, including Smithsonian American Art Museum, Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SF MOMA, The Phillips Collection, Hunter Museum of American Art and Norton Simon Museum.

LORETTA HOWARD GALLERY

525 West 26 Street, New York, NY 10001

www.lorettahoward.com

Helen Frankenthaler | Aimée Parrot, Pippy Houldworth Gallery, London - Soaked, Not Resting

Helen Frankenthaler | Aimée Parrot

Soaked, Not Resting

Pippy Houldworth Gallery, London

23 January – 21 February 2015

Before [Fall of 1952], I had always painted on sized and primed canvas – but my paint was becoming thinner and more fluid and cried out to be soaked, not resting.

– Helen Frankenthaler

Soaked, Not Resting examines the different ways in which celebrated Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler and emerging artist Aimée Parrott negotiate the picture plane, looking in particular at both artists’ deployment of staining.

An exponent of Color Field painting, Helen Frankenthaler is renowned for pouring thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas to create stained pools of vibrant colour. Developing Pollock’s pouring technique, Helen Frankenthaler initiated a new way of working with paint. Using squeegees, sponges and household brushes to manoeuvre the paint horizontally across the canvas, the resultant ‘soak-stain’ effect serves to emphasise the physicality of the surface. As Professor Mona Hadler explains: ‘the stained image appears to be neither in front of nor illusionistically behind the picture plane. It is literally one with the canvas.’

Helen Frankenthaler’s early works are characterised by airy, luminous compositions which give over to pure colour, with figure and ground merging into one. By the 1980s, her work gradually became calmer; Helen Frankenthaler’s mark making occurred in more muted tones, and though still concerned with the relationship between shape and space, her gestures were more considered. Quattrocento (1984) exemplifies this shift. Deep mauves blend into turquoise greens, bleeding across the canvas from left to right. Demarcated by black striations, this expanse of colour is offset by a border of lush pink.

Combining methods of painting and printmaking, Aimée Parrott uses staining to a similar end. Her large watercolour paintings are made using an open screenprinting technique where pigment is transferred directly onto the canvas through a polyester mesh. Like Helen Frankenthaler, gestural washes are embedded into the fabric weave of her paintings. However, whilst Frankenthaler emphasises the flatness of the canvas, Aimée Parrott instead plays with pictorial depth by building up veil-like layers of colour that coalesce into amorphous forms.

Describing how these pieces are made, Aimée Parrott explains: ‘the transfer of the pigment from screen to canvas creates a disjunction, a stutter between the original gesture and the surface on which it sits. Specifically, I want to create different spaces within the work; using raw or stained canvas holds the viewer on the surface of the piece, forcing them to consider the texture, the weave, whilst gestural marks push beyond the physical object into an illusory or imaginary space.’ This sense of depth is further intensified by the use of bleach, which breaks the homogeneity of the canvas in order to create an uneven ground for the print to sit on.

Where the pigment is pushed through the screen, ghostly traces of the original squeegee marks remain floating on, and behind, the surface, serving to disrupt the original application of watercolour. Whilst strangely familiar, these amoeba-like shapes evade recognition by constantly shifting in and out of focus. In effect, Aimée Parrott’s mark making triggers deeper, sensory memories. Playing with our perception, her approach calls to mind the way in which we process external stimuli, both visual and physical, in order to understand the world around us. Treating the canvas surface like a layer of skin, the artist simulates how the world imprints itself on our bodies. Significantly, Helen Frankenthaler also cited the influence of such external stimuli within her work, often translating the natural landscape into abstract compositions. In 1957, she commented, ‘if I am forced to associate, I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds, and distances held on a flat surface.’

Continuing Aimée Parrott’s exploration of different surfaces, the exhibition also features her distinctive ‘overlap’ works. Sitting somewhere between painting and sculpture, these pieces feature an extra layer of fabric hanging from the top of the canvas which mimic the composition beneath. This reproduction is a flatter, more homogenised image that partially obscures the underlying canvas, sanitised and removed from the surface of its original counterpart.

Whilst Helen Frankenthaler’s works on canvas are characteristically flat, her works on paper play with layering in a similar way to Aimée Parrott’s overlap paintings. Built with multiple coats of oil and overlaid marks, painting on paper enabled Helen Frankenthaler to experiment with the interplay between surface and deep space. For instance, in Blue on One Side (1962), patches of opaque blue assert the flatness of the picture plane. However, where these blocks of paint bleed into the fibres of the paper, the colour begins to withdraw backwards.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER was born in New York City, 1928, and died in Darien, CT, 2011. Following her first solo show in 1951 at age 22, Helen Frankenthaler’s work has been exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, amongst numerous others. Her estate is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Helen Frankenthaler’s work is in the collections of the V&A, London; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Cincinnati Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst many other public and private collections worldwide. Her work is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Born in England, 1987, AIMÉE PARROTT graduated from the University College Falmouth in 2009 with a BA in Fine Art and in 2014 received a Post Graduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London. Her work has been shown at Breese Little, London; Ink-d Gallery, Brighton; Simmons and Simmons, London; Tintype Gallery, London; Matt Roberts Gallery, London; Minerva Theatre, Chichester and A.P.T. Gallery, London. Aimée Parrott has completed residencies with the Artists League of New York and Angelika Studios, and is the recipient of the Archie Sherman Scholarship and the Ford Award.

PIPPY HOULDWORTH GALLERY

6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT

www.houldsworth.co.uk