2022: Helen Frankenthaler Radical Beauty
Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is recognized among the most important American abstract artists of the 20th century, widely credited for her pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She experimented tirelessly throughout her six-decade long career, producing a large body of work across multiple mediums. Opening ten years after her death, this exhibition shines a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts, which appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms. It will reveal Frankenthaler as a trailblazer of the printmaking movement, who endlessly pushed possibilities through her experimentation.
To coincide with this exhibition, our Monet x Frankenthaler display brings together two seminal works by Claude Monet and Helen Frankenthaler to reveal similarities in the artists' ambition and approach.
★★★★★ “The show of the season, if not the year” The Observer
★★★★★ “Revelatory” Evening Standard
★★★★★ “Spontaneous, vast, and colourful” Time Out
Exhibition highlights included East and Beyond (1973), created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space and Cameo (1980) in which Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour using her ‘guzzying’ technique where she worked surfaces with sandpaper and dentist drills to achieve different effects. Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000) shared its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and will occupy an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title.