05/12/2026
Monumental in scale, sensuously fluid, with poetic rhythm and movement built into the emotive process, Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings, on view now at are moving immersive experience to behold.
“Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance”, is 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.
“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. …Throughout her career, Frankenthaler engaged in a conversation with the history of art. Auguste (1977) was inspired by Auguste Renoir, reconfiguring the Impressionist’s fleshy palette and varied application into a field of loosely rectilinear brushstrokes. Allusions to landscape are also a constant in Frankenthaler’s oeuvre.…Frankenthaler once described her painting as “inner amorphous worlds or depths exploding on the surface and in perspective…Together, these paintings epitomize Frankenthaler’s continuous introduction of new painting techniques and imagery as well as her stalwart commitment to abstraction.”