Helen Frankenthaler: Paper is Painting

     This present exhibition features sixteen paintings on paper by Helen Frankenthaler dating from 1986 to 1997. The first striking characteristic in these works is their remarkable variety. They range from transparent to densely painted, dark to light, filled with painterly marks to nearly unmarked, centralized to open, contained to explosive. Frankenthaler's willingness to experiment freely, take risks, and explore the widest variety of artistic options during her prestigious career is truly astonishing, Relatively few artists of any period have so embraced open invention in the later parts of their careers. At the same time, Frankenthaler's sensibility is so strong that we recognize each work as uniquely hers. 

     For the more casual observer, Frankenthaler's natural artistic facility may conceal her deep involvement with every piece. Each work is a journey of discovery and embodies the artist's own feelings triggered by the world as sensed and imaginatively reinvented. The intensity of her exploration is a key feature of her work. "It's just for the time I am totally into creating a work. I am obsessed and the energy flows, the adrenalin flows, the ideas flow. I can't work fast enough and that's great." Frankenthaler embraces the creative moment and with that emphasizes the dynamic, complex, and changeable character of the word as she finds it. She is unwilling to rest with any one solution, yet each work wholly captures her dynamic thought process. 

     Works on paper have been an important component of Frankenthaler's oeuvre. Since the late 1970s, however, paintings on paper have grown in significance for her, and they may be seen now as a primary arena for experimentation in her late work. In fact, from 1992 to 2002, the artist worked almost exclusively on paper. During the seventies, she remarked, "Working on paper can even replace working on canvas for me, for periods of a time ... that was never true before, more and more, paper is painting."