Jules Olitski — Paintings from the 70s — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 18 → May 30, 2015

Galerie Templon presents an outstanding collection of paintings from the 1970s by Jules Olitski (1922-2007), the master of Color Field Painting. The artist experienced a period of intense creativity during the 1970s. Olitski, who had already perfected a spray-painting technique for laying colour onto his canvases, then went on to combine this with new techniques: colours were spread with a cloth or scraper, laid on with a roller to create thickly structured surfaces.

His ethereal works became increasingly material, offering textural effects left by the tools he used or inherent in the paint itself, with the new acrylics offering choices of matte or gloss, elastic or adhesive. Shadow and light play together across the grooves and textures of the monochrome surfaces.

Born in 1922 in Soviet Russia, Olitski emigrated to the USA in infancy and went on to study at New York University. He is one of Color Field Painting’s key figures as defined by US critic Clement Greenberg, whose pioneers include Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still; the second generation comprised Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, practitioners of a ‘self-critical painting’ centred on its own specific attributes (Ann Hindry).

A bilingual English-French catalogue will be published on the occasion of the show, with a foreword by Ann Hindry, art historian and art critic.

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Jules Olitski represented the USA at the 1966 Venice Biennale and in 1969 became the first living artist to have work shown at the Metropolitan Museum. His work, little-known in France despite being the subject of three exhibitions at Galerie Templon during the 1980s, has been shown at many leading institutions: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1967, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971, Portland Museum of Art, 1998, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2008. Olitski’s work are found in the collections of many leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Met Museum, NYC, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Tate Modern in London.