Open Fields: Transcendent Color in the Midcentury

Open Fields: Transcendent Color in the Midcentury brings together artists whose work, made between the 1950s and mid-1970s, pursued an audacious proposition: that color could transcend its material substrate to become an optical and embodied event. Working in parallel across continents, these artists stripped away any reference to the physical, visible world in search of an experience that was immediate, total, and irreducible. The movements their work has come to define — Color Field, Hard-Edge, Op Art, Washington Color School, Light and Space — activated the full perceptual force of color in paint, metal, paper, plastic, and film.