Viewing Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty

Hailed as one of the greatest shows of the year, Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty shines a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts, including works never shown before in the UK. Bringing together 30 works spanning over 30 years, it explores Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s greatest innovators.

Like her abstract painterly compositions, Frankenthaler’s woodcuts boast expanses of luminous colour and fluid forms as well as a spontaneity rarely associated with the medium. Standout works include the artist’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) and Madame Butterfly (2000), a monumental triptych created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata that shows Frankenthaler at her most expressive and experimental. Also featured in the show are all six woodcuts of the sequence Tales of Genji (1998), for which Frankenthaler employed her signature soak-stain technique.

‘There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism — that born at once feeling — that you see in her painting,’ says exhibition curator Jane Findlay. ‘And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works — revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.’