
Red Shift
1990
Helen Frankenthaler's Red Shift is an acrylic on canvas painting from 1990 that exemplifies her color field abstraction techniques. The work features bold chromatic shifts characteristic of her mature style.
- Medium
- acrylic on canvas
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
🔨 Auction Lot
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session
November 14, 2018
More by Helen Frankenthaler
Collectors of Helen Frankenthaler
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Artists in conversation
Morris Louis
American · b. 1912
Louis adopted a nearly identical soak stain technique after seeing Frankenthalers work, pouring thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed canvas to create luminous color field compositions with the same translucent, fabric absorbed quality visible here.

Kenneth Noland
American · b. 1924

Noland shared Frankenthalers direct application of stained color onto raw canvas, producing vibrant post war color field paintings where pigment and surface merge with the same lyrical abstraction and saturated hue relationships seen in this work.

Sam Gilliam
American · b. 1933

Gilliam extended the color staining tradition Frankenthaler pioneered, pouring and pooling paint across large unprimed canvases to achieve similarly dreamlike atmospheric color washes with the same gestural fluidity and vibrant chromatic expressiveness.
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