Jane Freilicher: Abstractions @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Jane Freilicher: Abstractions 

Kasmin Gallery, New York 

March 2 - April 22, 2023 

Jane Freilicher 

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 

kasmingallery.com

Painters of the East End @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Jane Wilson

Painters of the East End
Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson
Kasmin Gallery, New York
July 11 - August 16, 2019

JANE FREILICHER

Landscape in Water Mill, 1962

Oil on linen, 18 x 20 inches, 45.7 x 50.8 cm. 

Courtesy of the Estate of Jane Freilicher. 

Kasmin announces Painters of the East End, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue. The exhibition explores the commonalities and distinctions of the work produced amongst the coterie culture of Long Island’s South Fork during the mid-twentieth century, including Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson.

Artists have historically converged on Long Island seeking inspiration from the landscape and an escape from their confined urban studios, while still retaining access to the energy of New York City. With the mass influx of the European avant-garde following the onset of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the New York School, a thriving and collaborative artist-based community was born in the East End.

The Hamptons of the New York School was untamed, inexpensive, and a bastion of bohemian living. The opportunities provided by the area’s open spaces were developmental for the painters who set up there not only because of their practical advantages—larger studios, relative quiet—but for novel subject-matter that allowed for contemplations of the horizon, rural landscapes, and bodies of water, nodding to the lineage of the Romantic sublime.

Perhaps most crucial for these artists was their shared inspirations which led to a new model of community, differing in both structure and character from the frenetic energy of lower Manhattan. Such a social scene was integral to both the personal and artistic lives of the artists represented in the exhibition. Helen A. Harrison, Director at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, says of the period: “The painters who gravitated to Long Island's South Fork in the mid-twentieth century were a far more varied group than the earlier art colonists, who came primarily for the picturesque scenery. They ran the gamut from landscape painters to Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists, so it's clear that many were motivated by factors other than subject matter. Perhaps even more important than the beautiful surroundings and the ease of access from New York City was the magnetism of association, as artists attracted one another to form a vibrant creative community that continues to thrive today.”

The exhibition includes: Mary Abbott (b. 1921), Nell Blaine (1922 – 1996), Perle Fine (1905 – 1988), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014), Elaine de Kooning (1918 – 1989), Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992), Charlotte Park (1918 – 2010), Betty Parsons (1900 –1982), and Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015).

KASMIN GALLERY
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.kasmingallery.com