For the 2023 edition of Frieze Masters, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Paul Feeley, Howardena Pindell, and Emmi Whitehorse. These three masters of Post-War abstraction share an affinity for creating enigmatic compositions that vibrate with organic energy, movement, and color. Honing their craft over decades, each artist has pushed the limits of abstraction and left an indelible mark on its development into the 21st century.

In 1962, Helen Feeley gave her husband Paul Feeley a series of largescale calendar pages and encouraged him to keep a visual diary of his work. Spurred in part by this new creative method, Feeley’s 1962 paintings forged a new direction, one highlighting his interests in bold color and symmetry. Archetypal balustrade and jack-like shapes, such as those in his painting Helena (1962), would come to dominate his work for the remainder of his career, which was radically cut short only four years later.

While moving away from the color field washes more typical of his late-1950s paintings to a more hard-edge aesthetic in the early-1960s, Feeley’s shapes nevertheless bleed and quiver at their edges—the hallmark result of his thinned, oil-based paint. In 1965, Feeley’s tense interplay between form and color finally crystallizes with the making of fully three- dimensional sculptures, such as El Asich (1965). These painted wood sculptures, partly inspired by conversations on architecture he had with his friend, the artist Tony Smith, would literally push his work into new scales and dimensions.

Just a few years later, a young Howardena Pindell, who was then an MFA graduate student at Yale, began a series of gestural, figurative abstractions. These vigorous oil paintings from 1967 and 1968 reveal a preoccupation with the energetic impact of colors and test the boundaries of a restrained palette, while also exploring subtle variations in tone and contrast. These early works, as well her seminal spray-dot canvases from the early 1970s, demonstrate the lasting influence of Josef Albers’s color theory, which Pindell learned while taking Sewell Sillman’s popular course at Yale, one which she asserts “changed her life.”

Devising an ingenious method of spray painting through hole-punched card stock templates (which she had taken from her day job as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art), Pindell produced a series of acrylic on canvas paintings, such as Untitled (1970) which seem to shimmer, creating endless fluctuations of light and color where foreground and background bleed into one another. Pindell would refine this aesthetic over the course of the 1970s, while simultaneously restraining her color palette to mostly shades of white. In paintings like Untitled (1977)—which Pindell decided to tack, un-stretched, directly to the wall with nails—an overall field of white reveals itself upon closer inspection to tiny dots of yellow and blue impasto, made by squeegeeing the thicker acrylic paint through the punched templates she had made. In an ingenious move, Pindell decided to re-use the punched and discarded chads from the templates and to press them into the still-wet paint— solidifying an aesthetic that would come to characterize her work for the next several decades.

Emmi Whitehorse’s meditative abstractions, while so seemingly ethereal, have a grounding much more real, and much like her contemporary and friend Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work, attend strongly to issues of land, history, and identity. “My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time—of being completely, microcosmically within a place,” says Whitehorse. Over the course of four decades, Whitehorse has honed and refined a singular aesthetic characterized by paintings on paper and canvas which situate abstract, gestural marks amidst vaporous fields of vibrant color and unfolding symmetries. Yet these paintings resist falling into pure abstraction—in Whitehorse’s glyphs and gestures, one always has a sense of animate life.

In Field of Birds (1992), though abstracted, obvious visual references to both birds and plant-like forms appear, while in other paintings like Senega (2000), teeming masses of spirals, curves, and zig zags seem to resemble either microorganisms or the cosmos. In latter case, however, Whitehorse’s titling yields a further clue to meaning, referencing the flowering milkwort species Polygala senega, a plant native to North America used by indigenous peoples for centuries. Throughout her career, Whitehorse’s longstanding commitment to beauty and harmony has had its origins in the Navajo philosophy Hózhó, which seeks to achieve a balance of life, mind, and body with nature.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell, Emmi Whitehorse, and the estate of Paul Feeley.