Jules Olitski

One of the most accomplished artists associated with mid-20th century American abstraction, Jules Olitski transitioned through many phases of artistic practice. Deemed the greatest painter alive by the driving force behind the Color Field movement, the art critic Clement Greenberg, Olitski’s work was promoted alongside heavyweights such as Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman, and Helen Frankenthaler. Initially a key figure in Color Field painting, he later diverged from its characteristic flat, stained canvases and traditional brushwork, opting instead to explore the interplay between surface, colour, and texture.

“Throughout the 1970s, Olitski experimented with newly developed acrylic gels, pastes, and mediums, using brooms, mops, and other unconventional tools to apply paint. Paintings from this period are characterized by textured surfaces with underpainting, impasto, chiaroscuro, tinting, and glazing.”[1] With these new sensibilities in mind, he ventured toward another major career achievement: the “Mitt” paintings.

Olitski’s “Mitt” paintings, created between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, exemplify his decades-long exploration of innovative processes and non-traditional materials. He adapted a mitten-like glove used by professional house painters to apply a newly developed acrylic paint made of “interference” pigments. These pigments appear translucent when viewed head-on but reflect light and colour at different angles, creating a shimmering effect. “Opulent and luxurious, the Mitt paintings (so named for the housepainter’s mittens used to create them) are works of baroque exuberance, with inches-thick acrylic crests and troughs that belie their unique illusionistic effects. Olitski finished many of the paintings with fine mists of sprayed color applied at an oblique angle so that his scalloping gesture appears to materialize from within the surface.”[2]

Night Light (1988) is an early painting from the “Mitt” series, in which Olitski’s gestural approach, combined with an overlay of dark pigmented spray paint, reveals a unique sculptural effect. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, the painting either glows or recedes into shadow. A completely immersive experience, Night Light’s pulsating atmospheric fields of colour vibrate and shift before the eyes.

[1] “Jules Olitski.” 2016. Accessed April 12, 2025. https://olitskifoundation.org/about
[2] Alex Grimley, Jules Olitski: The Mitt Paintings 1988–1993, in Brooklyn Rail, October 24, 2024. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://brooklynrail.org/2024/10/artseen/jules-olitski-the-mitt-paintings-1988-1993