Surface/Subject

Olney Gleason is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Robert Motherwell in collaboration with The Dedalus Foundation. Robert Motherwell: Surface/Subject highlights Motherwell’s distinctive approach to developing his compositions, through a combination of bold gestures, varied surface textures, and overlapping planes of color. Across painting, collage, printmaking, as well as other mediums in which he worked, Motherwell animated his surfaces with a wide range of blacks, juxtaposed in areas of varying density. This endowed his oeuvre with enormous force and intensity: the subjects of his paintings emerge in large measure from the dynamism and intricacy of his painting process. Motherwell often worked on his paintings over extended periods of time, and he used the color black in especially rich and evocative ways – sometimes as a dense single pigment, applied without tonal modulation, and sometimes in translucent veils, which both enshroud and reveal their subjects. An example of this method can be seen in The Forge, 1965-1966/ 1967-1968, which Motherwell transformed – repainting the right side in dense black to give greater emphasis to the blue area around the central triangular form – after its debut in the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting at the Museum of Modern Art, 1966-67.

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