Helen Frankenthaler

Painting on paper provides Frankenthaler with an arena for experimentation in gesture and control. Her love of paper started in childhood, and she has retained the creative freedom she experienced working on paper in those early years. Over the past 10 years, she has worked almost exclusively on paper and in a scale that sometimes rivals her large canvases measuring 6 x 7ft.

Intriguingly, Frankenthaler paints her canvases like watercolours and her works on paper like paintings. For her canvasses, she often painted with the stain technique that she innovated during the early 1950’s when she began thinning her pigments to the consistency of watercolour and pouring them onto unsized canvas.

In contrast, Frankenthaler’s paintings on paper tend to be opaque and layered with oil or acrylic paint and mixed media. Many of the paintings on paper are clearly coaxed into existence. Although they incorporate accidental drips and marks, they appear to have been worked upon with intense labour and considerable calculation.

As Curator, Bonnie Clearwater, notes, “The most successful of Frankenthaler’s paintings on paper embody the elements of ‘great’ works of art or sublime moments in nature. They create and intense emotional experience.”

By focusing on her rich body of painting on paper, this exhibition will redirect the conventional art historical emphasis on Frankenthaler’s stain technique to her career-long fascination with creating paintings that are arenas of convincing, thrilling space occupied by infinitely energetic and graceful forms. Auszug Pressetext

Helen Frankenthaler - Paintings on Paper (1949 - 2002)
Royal Scottish Academy