Written by New York based About Art Guest Contributor Gracie Newman

Oh, the colors! Scrumptious, emboldening, immersive, triumphant—these are only a few of the words that come to mind when describing the hues of Helen Frankenthaler. Gagosian’s exceptional exhibition on 21st Street, The Moment and the Distance, showcases some of the painter’s most ambitious and gargantuan works. These evocative paintings are, to me, the pinnacle of abstraction: vivacious, layered, and above all, curious.

For me, the invigorating spirit of Frankenthaler’s work is rooted in her almost alchemical use of pigment. Her colors are clarions. As she herself once wrote, “color is the first message on the picture plane.” The show’s canvases employ all sorts of tactics in acknowledgement of this precedence, from her signature soak-stain technique to her playful negotiation of contrast. Every hue is a distinctive product of saturation and brightness, and each reflects her understanding of art as something that is at once spontaneous and carefully studied. Much like the world, perhaps—the color wheel simply is the painter’s cypher.

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