It's My House!

Ruth Pastine continues to evolve pure abstraction and follows the concepts of Minimalist theory, furthering the phenomenological experience of light and space in her work. She explores the subtle character and nuance of color, color and light are reduced to their most elemental form, working with oil paint on canvas, building layer upon layer, countless brush strokes coalesce and appear visually seamless, producing an image that is both objective and dematerialized. Challenging preconceptions about color, her investigations into the manipulation of color, light, and matter question the perceptual experience and redefine the visual field. 

As Ruth notes, “Color is a vehicle for existential experience, for engaging in the present moment of discovery for the sublime.” 

“Focused on the spontaneity of the painting process, I explore the phenomenology of color through oil on canvas paintings and multipaneled installations. I engage the austerity of the three complementary color systems which, although seemingly finite, access limitless possibilities. Working serially is an essential aspect of my creative process, as I evolve paintings in concert with and in juxtaposition to one another furthering the perceptual interaction of color. My work emphasizes heightened perception through the interaction of color contexts lending itself to phenomenology and raising consciousness towards existential inquiry. Confronting the unknown is always at the edge of discovery and is the onramp to new work”.

Born and raised in New York City, Ruth Pastine is best known for her neo-minimalist paintings advancing the seminal Light & Space movement emerging from Southern California in the 1960’s. Pastine received a four-year scholarship to Cooper Union for her B.F.A. Upon graduating she was awarded a post-graduate independent residency grant to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She received her M.F.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York where she focused on painting, color theory and critical studies. In 2009, Pastine was awarded a large site-specific public commission titled Limitless, composed of 8 large-scale vertical paintings, installed as two series in the adjoining lobbies of Ernst & Young Plaza, in downtown Los Angeles. In 2014, Ruth Pastine had her first 20-year museum survey exhibition entitled, Attraction: 1993-2013 at MOAH Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA with exhibition catalog essays by Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank with an appreciation by De Wain Valentine. 

In 2015, she opened Present Tense, Paintings and Works on Paper spanning 2010-2015 at the CAM Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA. Ruth Pastine’s paintings are included in numerous public and corporate collections, including the de Young Museum Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; MCASD Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; MFAH Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; MOAH Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Brookfield Properties, Ernst & Young Plaza, Los Angeles, CA; AXA Art, Cologne, Germany; Qualcomm, San Diego, CA; CIM Group Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA; PIMCO Global Headquarters, Newport Beach, CA; Proskauer, Washington, D.C.; United Airlines LAX, Los Angeles, CA among others. Ruth Pastine lives and works in Southern California. 

Ruth Pastine’s Depths Series, 2020 were created during the first months of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The heightened visual intensity of this sequence of oil paintings on paper speaks to the urgency of ensuing global conditions of the present moment along with her interests in bringing forth and locating luminosity from the depths of the color spectrum transcending the materiality of the hand painted surfaces, a seemly antidote affording light and hope amidst adversity of worldwide upheaval. Painting on paper presented a new working methodology for the artist through an intimacy in scale and immediacy in process. Pastine shares, “My work continues to be a contemplative and reflective investigation, exploring light, phenomena and unpredictability, and confronting the unknown through serial repetition and variation.” 

Ruth Pastine’s minimalist color field paintings challenge phenomena of color perception and the relativity of color, light, and space emphasizing the viewer’s encounter with the work. Her paintings have an optical resonance and draw from philosophical underpinnings. The artist’s long-held fascination with contradiction, the interplay of opposites, is explored through complementary color systems and underlying principles. Pastine’s paintings explore essential tensions that drive her work, the dialectic between the visceral and methodological, presence and absence, sensual and ethereal, materiality of surface and immateriality of light, and the finite and the limitless are fundamental throughout the course of her artistic trajectory. 

@ruth_pastine

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