Ruth Pastine (born 1964) is an American artist known for abstract minimalist paintings that explore the phenomenological experience of color, light and space.Kuspit, Donald. "Ruth Pastine/Frederick Holland at Deven Golden Fine Art," Artforum, May 1998, p. 150–51. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Carasso, Roberta. "Ruth Pastine," Art Ltd., January 2010, p. 60–61. Retrieved March 13, 2023. Critics relate her art to the Southern California Light and Space movement,Pincus, Robert L. "Color Guard—Ruth Pastine Revels in The Art of The Hue," San Diego Union Tribune, April 1, 1999, p. 48.Roth, David. M. "Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross," SquareCylinder, February 3, 2017. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Pagel, David. "What to see in L.A. galleries: Andrew Masullo’s off-kilter world, plus Gary Lang and Ruth Pastine," Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2016. Retrieved March 13, 2023. while identifying key differences, such as its focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and its reliance on basic, traditional means (brush, paint, pastels) rather than synthetic-industrial materials.Campognone, Andi (ed). "Introduction," Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Roth, David. M. "Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross," SquareCylinder, September 10, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023. In these regards, writers trace her artistic lineage to Monet and Malevich—who sought to capture light's ineffability—and to Abstract Expressionist and Color field painters such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who probed the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint.Morgan, Robert C. "Ruth Pastine at Deven Golden Fine Art," Review, February 15, 1998, p. 25.Kuspit, Donald. "Selfless Sensations: Ruth Pastine’s Paintings," in Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Andi Campognone (ed.), Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Cameron, Dan. "The Ghost in the Machine," The Technological Sublime, Kensington, MD: Pazo Fine Art, 2022. Pastine's paintings typically consist of seamless gradating bands or fields of color built in layers with countless brushstrokes, which optically coalesce and appear to pulse, float, dissolve, or glow as if backlit.Kalisher, Richard. "Ruth Pastine." American Contemporary Art, September 2011, p. 43.Morgan, Robert C. "Tense Present—Tense: Ruth Pastine," Cover Magazine, October 1995, p. 48. Peter Frank has written that she "paints as purely optical a kind of painting as it is possible to paint … nothing but color and its presentation, with myriad, closely shifted color modulations."Frank, Peter. "ART 2014 Roundup lll, Ruth Pastine," The Huffington Post, January 9, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
Pastine has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) and the Carnegie Art Museum.Carasso, Roberta. " Ruth Pastine: Present Tense," ArtScene, April 2015, p. 11–12. Retrieved March 13, 2023. Her work belongs to the public collections of SFMOMA,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ruth Pastine Artists. Retrieved March 13, 2023. the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Ruth Pastine, Blue 12, Collection. Retrieved March 14, 2023. The Phillips Collection,The Phillips Collection. Fetish (Red), Primary Red Series, Ruth Pastine, Collection. Retrieved March 14, 2023. and de Young Museum,de Young Museum. Pink (Light Red) from the series Double Primary Red Blue, Ruth Pastine, Artworks. Retrieved April 3, 2023. among others.Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. "We Are LA: Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation," August 1, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2023. She lives and works in Southern California.Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Ruth Pastine: BroadBands," Art and Cake, April 18, 2018. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
Early life and career Pastine was born in New York City in 1964 and raised in the East Village, Manhattan.Lindell, Karen. "Chaos and Creation," Ventura County Star, September 9, 2011, C, p. 20-21. She developed an early interest in art, and during her attendance at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan determined she would become an artist. After graduating, she studied art at Cooper Union—earning a BFA in 1987—and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.Hanson, Sarah P. "Ruth Pastine Paints to Tease the Eye," Introspective, September 21, 2015. Retrieved March 14, 2023. She continued at Hunter College (MFA, 1993), working with Vincent Longo, Robert Morris, Robert Swain and Sanford Wurmfeld.Phelps, Jesse. "Larramendy Hosting Solo Pastine Show," Ojai Valley News, August 27, 2004, p. A-8. Her focus at Hunter centered on painting, critical studies and the color perception work of 19th-century French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and the artist Josef Albers.
In the mid-1990s Pastine began appearing in group shows in New York and the West Coast,Karmel, Pepe. "Review: Vulnerability," The New York Times, September 22, 1995, p. C31. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Smith, Roberta. "Drawing from Life," The New York Times, February 7, 1997, p. C26. Retrieved March 14, 2023. and gained attention for solo exhibitions at Brian Gross Fine Art (1996, 1998) and Haines Gallery (2000) in San Francisco,Roche, Harry. "Mergings: Ruth Pastine," San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 18, 1996, p. 109.Baker, Kenneth. "Paintings Colored by Illusion/Ruth Pastine's work on display at Haines," San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2000. Retrieved March 13, 2023. Deven Golden Fine Art (New York, 1998), and Quint Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 1999). In 2001, she and her husband, artist Gary Lang, relocated to Southern California, where her work would become associated with the concerns of the Light and Space movement.Jenkins, Mark. "Rendering art through light and space," The Washington Post, October 28, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
In her later career, Pastine has had solo shows at Brian Gross (2008–20), Gallery Sonja Roesch (2008–23, Houston),Britt, Douglas. "Ruth Pastine's Paintings Astound," Houston Chronicle, November 10, 2010.Myong, Elizabeth. "Ruth Pastine’s Mirroring Offers a Kaleidoscopic, Enveloping Experience with Color," Houstonia, September 15, 2017. Retrieved March 14, 2023.Glentzer, Molly. "Ruth Pastine: Spectrum Depths," Houston Chronicle, January 5, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2023. and Edward Cella Art + Architecture (2009–19)Frank, Peter. "Ruth Pastine: Counterpoint," FABRIK, October 2012, p. 78–79. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Pagel, David. "What is truth? One painter’s mesmerizing new show offers an answer," Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Los Angeles Galleries Steal the Show at Expo Chicago 2018," LA Weekly, October 2, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2023. and Ace Gallery (2016–17) in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles, as well as survey exhibitions at MOAH ("Attraction: 1993-2013," 2014) and the Carnegie Art Museum ("Present Tense," 2015) in California, among others.
Work and critical reception
Pastine's art is rooted in the physical, retinal and perceptual phenomena of color and light. She works serially and systematically, methodically constructing oppositions within individual paintings and across bodies of work that challenge preconceptions about color. Her purely abstract oil paintings achieve their optical effects by juxtaposing, layering and transitioning complementary, saturated or contrasting-valued hues, engaging phenomena such as color relativity—the perception of influence between adjacent colors. Peter Frank described her approach as painterly and intuitive, an "on-site evolution" of color presences and relationships involving "optical induction, a stepwise edging of color fields towards and against but never away from one another."Frank, Peter. "Ruth Pastine: The Optical Sublime," in Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Andi Campognone (ed.), Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023. Donald Kuspit, among others, has noted a "dialectical" engagement with various dichotomies in Pastine's work: presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, undifferentiated and differentiated, objective reality and subjective perception.Will, Rachel. "Discovering the Sublime with Color Field Painter Ruth Pastine," Artsy, September 29, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
Early work (1990s–2004) Pastine's early paintings were small-scale, minimalist, nearly monochromatic works whose rigorous formal systems employed closely valued complementary colors that merged almost imperceptibly within the iconic square format favored by the Russian Suprematists. She painted them meticulously from the center out with a small brush, producing soft forms that seemed to glow, pulse, float or dissolve in mist-like color fields evoking infinity.Newhall, Edith. "Ruth Pastine," New York Magazine, February 16, 1998, p. 71. Critics suggested that her "Chance Rays" series (1994–8) responded to specific moments of sunlight—for example, the image Ray Painting #3 Milestone, which Robert L. Pincus wrote, "resembled a sunset viewed through a thin veil of fog." Reviewers connected this work's engagement with both the optical and metaphysical implications of light and color to the formalist, transcendental affinities of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Malevich, Rothko, Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, Mary Corse and Agnes Martin.
With her "Yellow Magenta Series" and "Red Green Series" (1998–2004), Pastine shifted her focus away from the appearance of external influences and natural associations to the experience of light discerned through the perception of color and the optical mixing of pigments on canvases purged of natural associations.Zinsser, John. "Ruth Pastine's Yellow-Magenta Paintings at Margaret Thatcher Projects," Artnet, October 20, 2000. Retrieved March 13, 2023.Johnson, Ken. "Abstraction And Immanence," The New York Times, October 6, 2000, p. E40. Retrieved March 13, 2023. New York Times critic Ken Johnson noted the new saturated hues in the former series—"stainy, monochrome pictures [that] vary in color from candy purple to salmon orange to taxicab yellow"—which were mixed wet-into-wet to create an ambiguous sensation of "glowing from within."Johnson, Ken. "Ruth Pastine," The New York Times, March 23, 2001, p. E35. Retrieved March 134, 2023. The "Red Green Series," meanwhile, often used subtler hues that San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker wrote, created "improbable, hypnotic sensations of color as both objective and dematerialized."
Later exhibitions & commissions Pastine diversified her color and light investigations in the 2000s to include new formats, geometric forms and color combinations exploring more intense and contradictory luminosities and temperatures. She began with several series between 2004 and 2009 that employed larger vertical and horizontal (rather than square) canvases, including the "Sameness & Difference," "Convergence," "Black Light" and "Limitless" works.Lindell, Karen. "Minding the Store," Ventura County Star, September 2, 2004, p. 10-11. The change in format shifted her work away from symmetry and toward compositions that were more architectural and less serene in terms of balance, rhythmic oscillation and emotion.