Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Positions in Color Field Painting

Curated by Karola Gräßlin

In New York, Color Field painting has suffered from a bad reputation for the past couple of decades—the legacy of provincial partisanship on behalf of an anointed few. Gräßlin extends the purview beyond the canonized New York–Washington, DC, inner circle of the early 1960s (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, et al.) to reconnect with Color Field forebears Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt—and even embraces Europeans, such as Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo. Clement Greenberg and André Emmerich probably wouldn’t have endorsed the paintings of Austrian Heimo Zobernig, who is perhaps best known for performing naked with brightly colored cloth in his “video paintings,” but his inclusion here—along with thirteen other artists and some forty canvases, from 1959 to the present—promises a lively and cosmopolitan look at a largely faded subject.

—Katy Siegel