Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian Gallery

Helen Frankenthaler, Composing with Color: Paintings 1962–1963
Gagosian Gallery – Uptown (New York)
September 11 – October 18, 2014

“Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color: Paintings 1962-63” explores a pivotal time in the painter’s career during which she began substituting color for line, sometimes using both oil and acrylic paint to fill her large-scale canvases. This is the first exhibition of the artist’s work organized by Gagosian in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

In framing these works, Bark took into consideration Frankenthaler’s painting style, as well as the color palettes of the works, the size of the canvases, and the framing precedent established for previous Frankenthaler exhibitions. Design Director Eric Knutzon worked with Frankenthaler Foundation’s Maureen St. Onge to create maple float frames with a warm grey-brown stain that established a distinct yet harmonious boundary between the paintings and exhibition space. The understated tones of the stem frames don’t overwhelm the art or space. Rather, they underscore the emphasis on both color and proportion present in the artist’s work, and recall the thin wooden ‘strip’ frames that had been put on many of the paintings in the artist’s lifetime.

Due to the logistical constraints of storing and transporting large paintings, and the fact that some of the Frankenthaler paintings to be in the exhibition were to undergo conservation treatments prior to the show, Eric and his colleagues measured and inspected the paintings at several locations in New York. After fabrication, the frames were delivered to the Foundation’s storage facility, where a Bark team installed the paintings in their frames.

View more information on the exhibition.