Outline

Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting, which developed mainly in the US from the latter half of the 1950s to the 1960s. By creating fields of color across the canvas, extensive and profuse pictures emerged. Among the works in our collection, those by Mark Rothko and Morris Louis would be representative examples.
 
This is the first exhibition featuring Color Field painting to be held in Japan. With focus on nine artists involved in Color Field, it introduces works dating mainly from the 1960s onwards. These artists each explored the relationship between color and painting in their own way, and in that process, many of them attained painting techniques of their own. Use of shaped canvases with irregular forms, staining the canvas with paint, spraying color on with a spray gun, etc.—these unfamiliar techniques opened up new horizons in painting. Moreover, the large canvases and the diverse ideas on color unfolded there continue to stimulate the viewer’s sensibility and imagination to the present day. This exhibition has been planned in the hope that, through the artist’s individual approaches toward colors embodied in these works, it will prove an opportunity to identify the large potential of color and thus painting.

Artists Represented

Jack Bush, Anthony Caro, Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Frank Stella