East and Beyond: Helen Frankenthaler and Her Contemporaries
Des Moines Art Center
Des Moines, IA
September 29, 2015 — January 17, 2016
Photo courtesy of Des Moines Art Center.
Press Release / Info
DES MOINES ART CENTER PRESENTS
EAST AND BEYOND: HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND HER CONTEMPORARIES
In celebration of the acquisition of Helen Frankenthaler's breakthrough color woodblock print, East and Beyond, 1973, the Art Center presents an exhibition contextualizing Frankenthaler's print.
The exhibition includes four works on paper by Frankenthaler, as well as 23 works on paper and ceramics by American and Japanese artists who were active during the 1950s to 1980s. Transcending and merging their cultures' printmaking traditions, these artists too moved "beyond East" and "beyond West,"Japanese pictorial traditions, including expressive sumi-e brush painting and Zen calligraphy, the use of un-sized supports, and ukiyo-e printing, inspired artists such as Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Motherwell and influenced their development as Abstract Expressionists, American ceramists Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Glenn Nelson, and William Wyman looked to Zen-inspired ceramics.