Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler: Drawing within Nature documents an exhibition of Frankenthaler's sumptuous paintings from the early to mid-1990s, many shown in New York for the first time.

This catalog documents an exhibition that focuses on Helen Frankenthaler's paintings on canvas of the early 1990s, along with three large-scale paintings on paper from 1995. In this period, Frankenthaler experimented with new mediums and techniques, resulting in thickly impastoed surfaces that recalibrate our understanding of her practice. A new essay by Thomas Crow examines these paintings in the context of the varied environments in which Frankenthaler lived and worked, from the warm-toned terrain of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to her seaside home and studio in Stamford, Connecticut.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways.