Helen Frankenthaler Paints Without Rules at Palazzo Strozzi

Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules (27 September 2024–26 January 2025), the largest exhibition of the revolutionary abstract expressionist painter ever held in Italy.

Organised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the exhibition situates Frankenthaler‘s large canvases, works on paper, and sculptures in dialogue with works by other artists such as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Anne Truitt.

The exhibition’s curator, Douglas Dreishpoon, described in a statement that ‘Helen Frankenthaler’s dedication to painting was enriched by her friendships with artists, some of whom became part of her extended family.’

Born in New York, Frankenthaler surrounded herself early on with kindred spirits who shared her unwavering commitment to experimentation. Among them was Jackson Pollock; the young Frankenthaler was taken by his fluid lines and experimentation with line as form itself.

Pollock’s impact on Frankenthaler’s work is made clear at Palazzo Strozzi, where his black-and-white enamel abstraction, Number 14 (1951), hangs beside Frankenthaler’s Mediterranean Thoughts (1960), an abstract oil painting with colourful, looping skeins.

Frankenthaler too would take her substrate off the easel, working from the floor to widen the paintings’ boundaries. She would pour thinned paint on the canvas, which would curdle into various formations, establishing new relationships between colour, space, and form.

Palazzo Strozzi’s director Arturo Galansino has done a tremendous job heading the museum’s contemporary art programme alongside the foundation’s Old Masters shows. Since his appointment in 2015, the museum has exhibited Tomás Saraceno, Ai Weiwei, Bill Viola, Marina Abramović, Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, and Anselm Kiefer.

In an interview with Ocula last year, Galansino described the museum as ‘a place for genuine dialogue with our history and identity, aiming to connect the past and the present, making both relevant.’

Main image: Exhibition view: Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (27 September 2024–26 January 2025). Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio.