Exhibitions

Helen Frankenthaler: painting without rules

The abstraction and creative freedom of a key figure in American art at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

bonart bilbao - 14/04/25

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The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is hosting an exhibition focused on a key figure in understanding 20th-century abstract painting: Helen Frankenthaler (New York, 1928 - Connecticut, 2011). Under the title Painting Without Rules, it invites us to discover the career of a creator who took the right path, mixing intuition, risk and a very personal artistic sensibility.

Although he moved among the big names of the New York scene of the 1950s —people like Jackson Pollock , Mark Rothko or David Smith— , Frankenthaler chose to open his own path. He devised a unique technique, called “soak and stain”, which allowed him to work with color as if it were a living substance. Over the years, he experimented with different materials and supports: paper, canvas, ceramics, tapestries, graphic work and even sculpture. His way of painting was not just a technical act, but a kind of intimate choreography, where movement and color met to build atmospheres that were never fully explained, always leaving room for interpretation.

The exhibition, which can be visited until September 28, reviews almost five decades of artistic production with around thirty works that span from 1953 to the early years of the 21st century. The tour is chronological, and functions as a journey through the artist's vital and creative stages: from the beginnings in bohemian Manhattan, through summers on Cape Cod with her then-husband Robert Motherwell, to the more contemplative period on Long Island, where the view of the sea became a recurring landscape in her abstraction. There is also a space dedicated to her period in the 1990s, marked by a contrast between the immediacy of some works and the more elaborate work of others, and by the last pieces made on paper, a medium that she always considered more flexible and spontaneous.

In addition to her own creations, the exhibition brings together works by other artists with whom Frankenthaler maintained creative and personal relationships: sculptures by Anthony Caro and David Smith , and paintings by Morris Louis , Kenneth Noland and Pollock himself . All of them were companions and friends who marked her artistic evolution. In fact, her friendship with Caro led her to spend the summer of 1972 in his studio in London, where she began to make sculpture with the same intuitive spirit with which she painted. Some of those pieces can now be seen at the Guggenheim.

This exhibition is the result of a shared effort between the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence , the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao itself. The curatorship is in charge of Douglas Dreishpoon , also responsible for the artist's catalogue raisonné, who has wanted to emphasize freedom and curiosity as the guiding threads of a work that never allowed itself to be pigeonholed.