Helen Frankenthaler | Reflections II

Helen Frankenthaler | Reflections II 1995
Lithograph
26 7/10 × 21 in
67.9 × 53.3 cm
Signed and numbered
Edition of 30

Helen Frankenthaler | Reflections II. Frankenthaler was a trailblazer of the modern print-making movement, endlessly pushing and transcending boundaries through relentless experimentation. She approached her work without pre-determined ideas and favoured an artistic process that focused on sensation and celebrating mistakes, arguing that they were fundamental to being an ‘artist’. In her approach she regularly remarked ‘suppose I do this’ which was radical in the context of printmaking of the time. Her liberated approach is echoed in the rust like pools of printing ink in Reflections II, which seem to have been allowed to simply flow wherever the surface of the paper permitted, without the guidance of the artist’s hand. Every print she made only added to her extensive vocabulary, a visual language that the art critic Judith Goldman notes as ‘one that was direct and unencumbered, abstract and realistic, free and controlled, empathetically flat and capable of creating a deep space’.

Helen Frankenthaler

The American painter Helen Frankenthaler was an enormously influential artist in the mid-20th century. Her unique approach to Abstract Expressionism—a movement she was at first heavily associated with—ushered in her own distinct “soak-stain” method. Born in 1928, Frankenthaler moved through a variety of phases over her 60 active years as an artist. Throughout her career Frankenthaler strove to emphasise the role of spontaneity in her work.

Frankenthaler died in 2011, her work already firmly established since the 60s in permanent collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.