Steidlville

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Joan Mitchell was one of the pre-eminent painters of the Abstract Expressionist period. She came to attention in the early 1950s but it is only recently that her work has gained the recognition that it deserves. Her large, gestural paintings display a remarkable acuity of feeling and being: their distinctive tempestuous surfaces revealing a vital reckoning with the world.
This book documents an exhibition of Joan Mitchell’s work at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London, which featured works made between 1960 and 1964. In her paintings of this period, Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright colors of her earlier compositions, instead using sombre hues and dense central masses of color to express something inchoate and primordial. The marks on these works are extraordinary: the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across their surfaces and smeared on with the artist’s fingers. Untitled (Cheim Some Bells), 1964, epitomises the mood and facture of these works, its variety of brush-marks and hovering form convey an enigmatic intensity.