Displaying items by tag: color field

These days, exhibitions of the American artist Mark Rothko's work are huge crowd-pullers, and his paintings fetch record sums at auction. Now the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is presenting a new exhibition of Rothko’s work, forty years after the last such show in the Netherlands. This is a unique opportunity to enjoy the artist’s work, as the exhibition is only being held in The Hague - and nowhere else.

With works constructed layer upon shimmering layer; Rothko's color fields are of unparalleled intensity and communicate universal human emotions such as fear, ecstasy, grief and euphoria. The artist was an intensely committed painter who invested his whole being in his art and, like many other great artists, he led a difficult life. Rothko was deeply disillusioned by the two world wars, and plagued by depression, yet capable of producing great art with an enduring capacity to comfort and enthral.

Color Field painting arrived, in the late 1950s, at a moment of simultaneous exhaustion and innovation: fatigue with the Abstract Expressionist hegemony on the one hand, and radical new developments in paint chemistry on the other.

These forces conspired in a movement to make paintbrushes superfluous and to give color, the essence of painting, even more primacy. As the critic and Color Field champion Clement Greenberg put it, “The more closely color could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations.”

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s (b. 1932) 90^th birthday by reuniting his Chatham Series for the first time in 40 years. The series of paintings were the first works Kelly made after leaving New York City for upstate New York in 1970. Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series will be on view at MoMA through September 8, 2013.

All of the 14 paintings in the Chatham Series are made out of two joined canvases, which come together to create an inverted “L” shape. All of the works vary in color and proportion and were made intuitively by the artist. For the final paintings in the series, Kelly used pieces of colored paper to determine the right hues and ratios for the finished works. The Chatham series was first exhibited in 1972 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Following the show, the works were split up until their reunion at MoMA.

Kelly, who was already an established artist when he created the Chatham Series, is best known for his hard-edge and color field paintings, which are defined by an overarching minimalist aesthetic. Kelly aimed to erase any trace of the artist’s hand, making what he described as “anonymous” art.

Ellsworth Kelly: Colored Paper Images is currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. through December 1, 2013. Kelly (b. 1923), a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, is best known for his hard-edge and Color Field paintings as well as for his involvement in the minimalist movement.

The exhibition at the National Gallery features a series of paper-pulp works that were first unveiled in 1977. The 23 works, which are drawn from the museum’s collection, feature erratic edges and irregular textures, a departure from Kelly’s previous works, which are comprised of sharp angles and precise curves. Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art said, “Kelly has long been recognized for his mastery of form and color, but even to those who know his work well, these Colored Paper Images will come as a revelation.”

A pioneering force in postwar abstraction, Kelly created his colored paper images by placing molds on single sheets of paper and filling them with colored and pressed paper pulp. Once the pulp settled, the molds were removed and the sheet along with the colored pulp was run through a printing press, fusing the damp paper layers together. Multiple impressions were made of each image.

The National Gallery of Art has a longstanding relationship with Kelly, which began in 1975 when the institution acquired its first work by the artist. The Gallery now owns over 200 pieces by Kelly including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints.