Elizabeth Harris Gallery in cooperation with The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings from the 1950s by Pat Passlof. This will be the gallery’s first exhibition of Passlof’s work since the exhibition of recent paintings held at the gallery shortly after her death in late 2011, and the first time her classic Abstract Expressionist paintings, dating from 1950 through 1959, will be shown together since the decade in which they were painted. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Raphael Rubinstein, “An Interstice of Time: Pat Passlof in the 1950s.”

Pat Passlof was born in Georgia in 1928, and grew up in New York City. She studied at Queens College, and in 1948 attended summer school at Black Mountain College, where she studied with Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers and Merce Cunningham, among others. She continued to study privately with de Kooning after returning to New York, where de Kooning also introduced her to her future husband, fellow painter Milton Resnick. After earning a BFA degree at Cranbrook Academy in 1951, Passlof quickly established herself in the vital milieu of downtown New York Abstract Expressionist painters centered on Tenth Street, where she had a series of studios and took part in group exhibitions through the 1950s.

Passlof’s work from the 1950s—as indeed from her entire life—is exploratory and risk-taking. Paintings from the beginning of the decade show the influence of de Kooning, but are fully-realized and original works in their own right, and soon give place to work whose “exuberance of formal invention,” as Raphael Rubinstein writes, “is closer to Kandinsky.” In his essay, “An Interstice of Time: Pat Passlof in the 1950s,” Rubinstein also notes Passlof’s “turbulent brushwork with abstracted forms that exude a quasi-totemic presence” in paintings of “deep pathos and brute physicality.” Imagery, whether triangles or circles or suggestions of avian life beloved of the artist, coexists with painterly gesture, evincing what Rubinstein calls “her quest for a sense of dramatic presence and her restless exploration of the zone between abstraction and figuration.” Toward the end of the decade, Passlof’s work lightened in density as it approached the “atmospheric allover style,” coupled with an indefinable sense of wit, which she would explore further in the 1960s and beyond.

A retrospective exhibition of Passlof’s paintings from 1948 to 2011 was organized by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in 2012, and traveled to the Fine Art Museum Western Carolina University. The current exhibition is Passlof’s eighth solo show at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, but the first time her brilliant body of 1950s Abstract Expressionist paintings has been shown as a group since a March Gallery exhibition in 1959. It is a major rediscovery.