Jules Olitski

"Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape. It has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at." Jules Olitski

Hackett Mill is pleased to present Jules Olitski: Embracing Circles 1959-1964, an exhibition of Olitski's large-scale Core paintings on view on the West Coast for the first time. Karen Wilkin, New York-based critic and curator of the upcoming traveling exhibition Revelations: Master Paintings and Drawings by Jules Olitski, will provide an introduction to the show at 5:30 pm on July 9, 2010. A new catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by David Moos, curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

A highly important American Color Field painter, Olitski was championed by influential art critic Clement Greenberg in the late 1950s. Together with his contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Olitski pushed the boundaries of form and color to create highly charged canvases. Their formal process and resulting aesthetic focused more on consistency and less on the action and gesture coming out of the Abstract Expressionist tradition. Here color becomes the dominant subject.

The paintings on exhibit feature bright, overlapping orbs of color. Olitski painted them on unstretched, unprimed canvases that were stapled to the floor, where he applied magna acrylic paint and varnish using rollers and brushes. In his essay Color Situation David Moos says, 'By working beyond a traditional palette, Olitski achieves an arresting, individualized conception of painting'. Many of these canvases show the pentimenti of Olitski's earlier experimentation with color and form, and document his search for a dynamic composition that directly invites and solicits a personal involvement from the viewer. The resulting group of canvases are visually stunning and emotionally engaging.