Pousette-Dart is widely known as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, but his achievement can also be understood beyond the confines of that movement. His practice, which spanned painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, often explored the spiritual and transcendental possibilities of art making. Deeply interested in elemental forms, qualities of light, and abstract beauty revealed within nature, the artist strove toward an enlightened, improvisational mode of creating throughout his career.The paintings and works on paper in the gallery’s show use layered, painterly strokes to create meditative, yet assertive, compositions focused on colour and light. Characterised by all-over fields of individual marks that coalesce into balanced, energetic paintings, the vibrant works in Pace’s Palm Beach exhibition exemplify the style Pousette-Dart began cultivating in the 1960s.

Curator and art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, who organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s 1997 Pousette-Dart exhibition, wrote of the artist’s mid and late career works, ’...the linear quality of the earlier work gave way to vibrating optical effects achieved by the juxtaposition of individual daubs of colour. Rather than a line delineating contours, it is the visual mediation of individual chromatic incidents congealing in our vision that is described by what the artist called edges ‘of feeling/the living edge of form/created living form.’

Pousette-Dart’s work can be found locally in the collections of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. He is also represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; and many other international institutions.