Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance

Gagosian is pleased to announce Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance, an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Surveying four decades of paintings from 1960 to 1992, the exhibition features more than twenty of Frankenthaler's largest, most ambitious works. Arranged by decade, these canvases—with their monumental scale, sensuous color, and innovative compositions—offer new perspectives on the artist's continual reinvention of her practice. The exhibition's title is derived from an incisive 1975 essay by Barbara Guest, a poet and friend of the artist, who wrote: "She has rewarded us with the astonishing combination of freedom with restraint, extravagance with discipline, suggestion and definition. The moment becomes the distance." Embodying Frankenthaler's exploratory, lyrical approach to abstraction, the canvases on view benefit from an expansive scale that enhances the exceptional visual impact of their brilliant colors and varied gestures. Created with diluted oil paint applied directly to untreated canvas, Provincetown I (1961) features compelling contrasts between line and color, bound and unbound form. In the late 1960s and 1970s, following her move from oil to acrylic paint, Frankenthaler shifted to composing with large, flat slabs of color. Mornings (1971) is distinguished by flowing descents of yellow, buff, and white tones interrupted by linear filaments drawn with black marker, which is also used in Thanksgiving (1972) to arrange biomorphic shapes in precarious balance.