Gallery & Studio Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 4, April/May 2004, New York

Beata Taschner Puts a New Spin on Color Field Painting

To place Color Field painting into a historical context, critics and scholars often refer to it as 'post painterly abstraction', a term that Clement Greenberg, the monolithic critic and formalist champion, coined for the title of an influential exhibition he curated at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1964.

Beata Taschner, whose luminous oils on canvas were recently exhibited at Agora Gallery, 415 West Broadway, Soho, would appear to be direct descendent of Jules Olitski, Ellsworth Kelly, and other renowned Color Field painters who were featured in that landmark exhibition.

However, while they involve fields of color, Taschner's paintings could hardly be called post-painterly. For unlike her worthy predecessors, who generally treated the canvas as a single plane, and in case of Kelly, often employed a single color, Taschner employs myriad, subtly modulated strokes of various colors to bring her canvas alive. Her paintings are hardly impassive and definitely not hard-edged. And even when she appears to employ a single overall color, such a red or blue, subtle modulations and tonalities can be discerned on closer perusal, and the hand of artist is much more visible than one normally finds it to be in this sort of painting. Indeed, it could be said that Taschner effectively bridges the gap between the more lyrical variety of Abstract Expressionism, as seen in the early paintings of Philip Guston (whom one critic, further complicating the matter, referred to as an 'Abstract Impressionist') and the subtler species of Color Field painting in which Jules Olitski specialized. But while Olitski finally resorted to a spray-gun to achieve his overall surfaces, in which color particles appeared to coalesce, Taschner still builds her compositions in the traditional manner with a brush-albeit a brush that appears to have been dipped in liquid light rather than ordinary pigment!

While Taschner's painterliness is admirably austere, it is very much present nonetheless. Brilliant primaries are blended to create delicate secondary hues that radiate out from the canvas to envelop the viewer in shimmering auras. The effect of standing in front of one of her canvases is very much like experiencing the subtle shifts of light that occur at certain moments in early morning or late afternoon.

Taschner is acutely attuned to minute chromatic variations that can easily escape the attention of those who are less observant. She has the rare ability to make them immutable for the rest of us by capturing them in pigment. And her process has very much to do with it. For the prismatic effects that flicker across the surfaces of Beata Taschner's paintings could only be achieved by an artist in possession of surpassing painterly finesse.

-- Wilson Wong

Artist Highlights

• Lives In:    Austria
• ArtWanted.com Gallery:    Fine Art