Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade

“The Last Decade,” an exhibition of fourteen paintings by Joan Mitchell produced during the last ten years of her life. The show is curated by art historian Richard D. Marshall. Mitchell is recognized as a principal figure – and one of the few female artists – in the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists, after the aesthetic breakthroughs of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Her early works are characterized as turbulent and related to personal bereavement. This turbulence is often expressed in dense versus transparent strokes, warm versus cool palettes, gridded structure versus chaos, and choppy versus continuous brushstrokes. Working for the most part on multiple panels or large-scale canvases, she strived to evince a natural, rather than constructed, rhythm from the composition, which emanated from the expansiveness of her gesture and from her uninhibited use of color.