Jules Olitski
Paintings from the Seventies
Galerie Templon presents an outstanding collection of paintings from the 1970s by Jules Olitski (1922-2007), the master of Color Field Painting.
The artist experienced a period of intense creativity during the 1970s. Olitski, who had already perfected a spray-painting technique for laying colour onto his canvases, then went on to combine this with new techniques: colours were spread with a cloth or scraper, laid on with a roller to create thickly structured surfaces.
His ethereal works became increasingly material, offering textural effects left by the tools he used or inherent in the paint itself, with the new acrylics offering choices of matte or gloss, elastic or adhesive. Shadow and light play together across the grooves and textures of the monochrome surfaces.
The artist
Born in 1922 in Soviet Russia, Jules Olitski emigrated to the USA at a very young age. He was a master of Color Field Painting. After perfecting a spray-painting technique for laying colour onto his canvases, in the 1970s he went on to develop new techniques, spreading colours with a cloth or scraper or laying them on with a roller to create thickly structured surfaces. Jules Olitski died in 2007.
