Ruth Pastine: Limitless

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is pleased to announce its lead exhibition for the Fall 2009 season: Limitless, a new series of paintings by Ruth Pastine. This exhibition represents Pastine’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles, and marks the evolution of her contemporary color-field work exploring the subtle character and nuance of color and the transitory nature of light. Ultimately her work challenges our preconceptions of color itself. Pastine’s Limitless offers both an advancement and refinement of her work to date. The exhibition will be accompanied by an introductory statement from art historian Donald Kuspit.

Investigating perceptual color and formal systems inherent in the painting process, Pastine creates works with luminous surfaces that optically oscillate, shift, and glimmer. This luminosity invites close inspection, which reveals that each painting’s visually seamless surface is actually an intimate grouping of countless strokes of oil on canvas. Rigorously painted and worked wet into wet, layer upon complete layer, Pastine’s technique results in complex and shifting color transitions before resolving into a continuous skin across each canvas.

For Limitless, Pastine focuses on the complementary colors of red and green, and their variations, as she searches for nameless color experiences within set boundaries. Drawing upon these strong dominating yet opposing colors, Pastine explores the visual torque offered by equally balanced colors. Unique to Pastine’s oeuvre and in an advancement of her creative process, Limitless represents the development of finite perceptual color systems that embue each individual painting with limitless and unpredictable variations.

Ruth Pastine was born and raised in New York City. She received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in New York in 1987 and received an M.F.A. in Painting at Hunter College in 1993. Pastine recently received solo exhibitions with Gallery Sonja Roesch in Houston, TX and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco. She was recently awarded a commission to create an installation of works for the lobby of the Ernest & Young Plaza in Los Angeles. Limitless is the first solo artist exhibition mounted by ECAA in its new Los Angeles Location at 6018 Wilshire Boulevard across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.