Frieze Masters — London, UK
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 2024 edition of Frieze Masters, London with New York Women Artists: 1950s–1970s. The presentation includes the work of nine artists, born between 1903 and 1946, who each brought a singular voice to post-World War II abstraction. The installation honors recent scholarship and an art world where women artists are breaking sales records and achieving major institutional recognition for their role in Abstract Expressionism and postwar abstraction.
An excerpt from the Press Release:
A second generation of women abstractionists includes Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946), Pat Lipsky (b. 1941), and Susan Fortgang (b. 1944). Pat Lipsky’s work is associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field painting. Her Wave paintings are exuberant, vivid, and fresh. They are, by necessity, painted in one shot: acrylic on unprimed canvas, with color bands in loose wave formations. The waveforms are loose and aqueous, made by soaking the canvas with water and pouring liquid color. The color bands often dissolve into drips and splatters within the rectangle of the canvas. The forms do not extend to the outer edges of the canvas; they float in its open space. Nina Yankowitz created daring, dynamic works: spraying mists of acrylic paint to produce atmospheric expanses and then hanging the unstretched canvases in loose soft folds that cascade down and across the wall. Yankowitz will be the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, in Spring 2025. Susan Fortgang creates paintings with a physical presence, using thick layers of paint to form textured surfaces. She studied painting at Queens College, before going to Yale’s School of Art. where she would earn a BFA in 1966 and MFA in 1968. Early on, the artist made action paintings. These works from the late 1960’s employ vibrant palettes and biomorphic forms, capturing the excitement of the moment, undergirded by a logic of abstract shapes seemingly gravitating towards one another in companionship.
