YARES ART is pleased to present Jules Olitski: Voyage into the Light, an exhibition of fifteen landscapes on paper dating from the artist’s final decade. An early pioneer of Color Field painting, Olitski turned toward landscape in the mid-1990s, dedicating his vast energies to depicting visionary scenes inspired by his waterfront studios in New Hampshire and Florida.

Jules Olitski’s art flowered in the final decade of his half century career, as he worked with equal intensity on abstract painting and sculpture, printmaking, life drawing, landscapes, and abstractions in watercolor, gouache, and pastel on paper. Art critic Michael Fried, writing about these landscapes, remarked: Olitski “seems to have worked not only with growing imaginative freedom but also with a kind of visionary intensity that belongs only to a select group of masters in the history of modern art.”

Stressing the continuity of his vision whether working in abstract or representational modes, Olitski depicts sailboats, plants, and figures in many of these works while others, like Night Legend (2002) and Night Arrives (2006), capture the dramatic atmosphere of the landscape through subtle contrasts of light and dark. Olitski, inspired throughout his career by the Old Masters, channels the landscapes of Eugene Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner in works containing an expansive range of moods, from the serene stillness of Sail in Evening Light (2005) to the tempestuous energy of Off Henry Key (1999). Sea and sky dissolve into one another in the lusciously colored Shimmering Cove (2001), while Olitski’s mastery of color is evident in the bold palettes of Estuary Light (2001) and Voyage in an Orange Light (2004).

Olitski’s works on paper have been the subject of exhibitions in galleries and museums across North America including the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Born in Snovsk, Soviet Russia, in 1922, Olitski and his family emigrated to the United States the following year and settled in Brooklyn. After studying art at the National Academy of Design, the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Olitski had his first solo exhibition in 1951 at Galerie Huit in Paris. In 1958, his first New York solo show was held at the Alexander Iolas Gallery. Olitski’s work has been exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Hirshhorn Museum; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Musée de Valence, France. In 1969, Olitski was the first living American artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His paintings are held in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Modern, London.