Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) was a pre-eminent painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation, and, along with Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few female painters of her era to gain critical and public acclaim. She came to attention in the early 1950s but only recently has her work won the recognition it truly merits. Her large-scale gestural paintings register a great acuity of feeling and tremendous vitality. Leaving America documents Joan Mitchell's exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London, which featured works made between 1960 and 1965, after she had relocated from New York to France. In the paintings of this period Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright palette of earlier compositions, instead deploying more sombre hues and dense central masses of color. The brushwork in these paintings is nonetheless full of zest, the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across surfaces and smeared on by hand.