inbetween explorations

Fiesta Helen Frankenthaler 1973

Helen Frankenthaler Palazzo Strozzi -Firenze

Final days of this glorious exhibition, a retrospective of paintings and sculptures created by the artist Helen Frankenthaler between 1953 and 2002, displayed in the frame of Palazzo Strozzi.
Curious to learn more about this incredible artist, I quickly hopped on a train to Florence.
Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York in 1928, and it was from this city that she began her journey in the 1950s, with her first solo show. It is here that her path crosses with those of artists, life partners, and mentors she met, initially influencing her artistic expression, and later becoming those who formed her inner close circle.
Her work has been displayed in prestigious museums: The Whitney Museum, The Whitechapel in London, the Kongresshalle in Berlin as early as 1969, to name just a few, and later at The Guggenheim Museum and The Venice Biennale.
She passed away in Darien, her final residence, in 2011.
Robert Motherwell, her first husband, but also Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith and Anthony Caro, were among the most important persons in her artistic journey and  life.

Helen Frankenthaler Western Dream 1957- Palazzo Strozzi Firenze.

What strikes me immediately is her unpredictable movement, which expands over and beyond the canvas.
Her deliberate disregard for rules, though well aware, drawing inspiration from the Old Masters, Cubism and the Renaissance, but then taking a turn, leaving us with open questions, a space of emptiness for reflection and re-imagination, where nothing truly disappears forever. There’s a story to tell, which, for Helen, is renewed in every canvas.
In the early 1960s, whilst she abandoned traditional painting techniques. she decided to use acrylic paints, diluted with solvents, making them fluid on untreated canvases that had not been prepared with glue, and she did this with all possible tools: hands, fingers, spatulas, brushes, sponges. She used an innovative technique called “soak-stain,” and the result still evokes awe today. Not everything is revealed, I love this ambiguity. So, is it poetry or abstraction? We don’t know. Certainly intuition.

Star Gazing 1989 Helen Frankenthaler -Palazzo Strozzi Firenze

In her canvases, you find a transparency, where the design is guided by the use of light and color, but also by dashed lines, spots, overlapping symbols that emerge on the surface.
She herself says: “My only rule is that there are no rules. It’s all about deliberate risks.” In the subconscious, there are our limits but also the intuition to go beyond.
Try to see this exhibition or search for Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings out there.

You may find yourself floating on her cloud.

Till soon,