Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
Don Eddy is a contemporary representational painter. He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material. Critics such as Donald Kuspit have resisted such labels as superficially focused on obvious aspects of his painting while ignoring its specific sociological and conceptual bases, dialectical relationship to abstraction, and metaphysical investigations into perception and being; Kuspit wrote: "Eddy is a kind of an alchemist … [his] art transmutes the profane into the sacred—transcendentalizes the base things of everyday reality so that they seem like sacred mysteries." Eddy has worked in cycles, which treat various imagery from different formal and conceptual viewpoints, moving from detailed, formal images of automobile sections and storefront window displays in the 1970s to perceptually challenging mash-ups of still lifes and figurative/landscapes scenes in the 1980s to mysterious multi-panel paintings in his latter career. He lives in New York City with his wife, painter Leigh Behnke.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The Fischbach Gallery is an art gallery in New York City. It was founded by Marilyn Cole Fischbach in 1960 at 799 Madison Avenue. The gallery in its early days became known for hosting the first significant solo exhibitions of now leading art world figures including Eva Hesse, Alex Katz and Gary Kuehn.
John Button was an American artist, well known for his city-scapes. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley then moved to New York City in the early 1950s. He became friends with Fairfield Porter and Frank O'Hara and assumed his part in the New York School of Painters and Poets.
Adriana Varejão is a Brazilian artist. She works in various disciplines including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and photography. She was an artist-in-resident at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2004. Varejão lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art. Since her early career, they have noted in her work an openness to spontaneity, accident and marginality and a rejection of permanency, monetization and disciplinary conventions that Stephen Westfall characterized as an "almost shocking sense of freedom."
Laura Owens is an American painter, gallery owner and educator. She emerged in the late 1990s from the Los Angeles art scene. She is known for large-scale paintings that combine a variety of art historical references and painterly techniques. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Alice Dalton Brown is an American painter known for realist works that capture the light and texture of specific, if often invented, places and moments. Her signature motifs include exteriors of Victorian houses, barns and waterscapes viewed through windows or sheer curtains, by which she explores the play of light, shadow, reflection and geometry across various surfaces. Critic J. Bowyer Bell wrote of Dalton Brown's style, "her realist works are more than the sum of their parts. In fact, there are so many parts so cunningly included, so many skills on display, that the result is almost an encyclopedia of what can be done."
Dona Nelson is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in Art in America and Artforum credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."
Eva Lundsager is an abstract landscape painter. She received her BA from the University of Maryland and MFA from Hunter College. A 2001 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts, Lundsager has been exhibited in the Jack Tilton, New York at the Greenberg Van Doren, and other galleries. She has also published Ascendosphere, a book of her watercolors.
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune,The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko." She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.
Joanna Pousette-Dart is an American abstract artist, based in New York City. She is best known for her distinctive shaped-canvas paintings, which typically consist of two or three stacked, curved-edge planes whose arrangements—from slightly precarious to nested—convey a sense of momentary balance with the potential to rock, tilt or slip. She overlays the planes with meandering, variable arabesque lines that delineate interior shapes and contours, often echoing the curves of the supports. Her work draws on diverse inspirations, including the landscapes of the American Southwest, Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalan art, Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, and Mayan art, as well as early and mid-20th-century modernism. Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors", through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement."
Judy Ledgerwood is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Her work confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture. Critic John Yau writes, "In Ledgerwood’s paintings the viewer encounters elements of humor, instances of surprise, celebrations of female sexuality, forms of vulgar tactility, and intense and unpredictable combinations of color. There is nothing formulaic about her approach."
Harriet Shorr, was an American artist, writer, poet and professor. She was known for large-scale realistic still life paintings.
Judith Simonian is an American artist known for her montage-like paintings and early urban public art. She began her career as a significant participant in an emergent 1980s downtown Los Angeles art scene that spawned street art and performances, galleries and institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), before moving to New York City in 1985.
Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.
Frances Barth is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works. She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor. Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth’s paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness … [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."
