Jules Olitski (1922-2007) is one of the most collected and accomplished artists associated with the Color field movement and 20th century American abstraction.
Olitski's best works ask the viewer to consider how the artwork is created and contained on the picture plane. He wants the viewer to think about the conventions and strategies used by his contemporaries and predecessors working in abstraction.
A leading figure of American Color Field painting, Olitski had already radically expanded the possibilities of the medium through his celebrated spray paintings of the 1960s. During the 1970s, he continued to challenge the conventions of painting, experimenting with gels, pastes, impasto, glazing, and unconventional tools including brooms, mops, and squeegees. By the mid-1980s, this sustained interest in materials and their behaviours culminated in his embrace of Plexiglas as a new and unusually responsive support as an alternative to paper or canvas.
"OG Fate" belongs to one of the most experimental phases of the artist’s career. Water-based acrylic and oil-based enamel are applied to a large, irregularly shaped Plexiglas surface, allowing colour to function simultaneously as pigment, light, and object. The transparency of the support fundamentally alters the relationship between paint and ground: rather than simply occupying a surface, colour appears to hover within it, recede beneath it, or project outward from it.
Olitski selected Plexiglas for precisely these optical possibilities, incorporating translucent, metallic, iridescent, and interference effects whose appearance shifts according to the viewer’s position and the surrounding light. The result is neither purely pictorial nor fully sculptural, but something between the two—a painting whose material presence continually disrupts the illusion of immaterial colour.
The work is characteristic of Olitski’s refusal to treat abstraction as a fixed visual language. Throughout his career, he repeatedly reinvented his methods in pursuit of a more immediate experience of colour. Here, colour is no longer simply applied to a support; it activates the support itself, producing a mutable field of light, density, transparency, and reflection. The work’s dynamic and highly-textured surface and physicality demonstrate Olitski’s enduring conviction that colour could operate independently of representation. Here color, texture and light are capable of generating a unique atmosphere, depth, and emotional resonance.
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"OG Fate"
USA, 1986
Water-based acrylic and oil on plexiglass
Signed, titled, and dated, along with various notations by artist verso
41.75"H 82.25"W (work)
Very good condition
Provenance:
GalleryOne, Toronto
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