Joan Mitchell: Leaving America. New York to Paris 1958 - 1964

Between 1960 and 1964, Joan Mitchell produced work of peculiar darkness and intensity. Painted during a difficult time in the artist’s life soon after her move from New York to Paris, the works of this period reveal a distinct shift in sensibility. In these paintings Mitchell rejected the all-over style and bright colors of her earlier compositions in favor of sombre hues and dense central masses of pigment expressive of something startling and primordial. Rhythm and vibrancy were displaced for inchoate matter. There is an astonishing physicality to these works. Paint has been flung and squeezed onto the canvases, smeared on by Mitchell’s fingers, and spilt and spluttered across their surfaces to create sculptural and tempestuous terrains that attest a vital reckoning with the world.