FRANCINE TINT : Life in Action: NATIONAL ARTS CLUB

Francine Tint: Life In Action

November 7 - December 2, 2022

Location: 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003

Hours: Monday-Sunday; 10 am - 5 pm

The National Arts Club (NAC) is proud to announce Life In Action, a solo exhibition of twelve recent paintings by abstract painter and colorist Francine Tint, curated by art historian Robert C. Morgan. Tint's visual vocabulary of abstraction creates expressive paintings that excite the eye with energy, light and color. "The emphasis in [her] luminous work is on the sensual properties of color and surface" (David Ebony, Art Critic, Art in America). Driven by the boundless possibilities of a large- scale canvas, the artist works in a variety of methods that include paint pours, drawing and collage. Art critic Karen Wilkin reviewed in Art in America: "Francine's strengths have always been her idiosyncratic sense of color, her ability to draw energetically at large scale, and her refusal to make ingratiating pictures." Tint's work provides a new perspective on the living legacy of abstract expressionism and color-field painting. She was inspired by Larry Poons and Helen Frankenthaler, among other great colorists. Francine Tint was selected by Larry Poons to participate in the early days of Anthony Caro's Triangle Artists' Workshop in NY. Clement Greenberg also frequently visited her studio. In the Observer Culture, Piri Halasz says that "Ms. Tint, well into her career, has been experimenting. She has been working long and hard to differentiate her work from its former context and time frame, doing her best to drag her own unique brand of Color Field painting, more than three decades after she first premiered it, kicking and screaming into the 21st century." In the exhibition catalogue for the show, Robert C. Morgan explains that "through her consistent hard-earned openness, Tint's paintings reveal a potential for what we might call 'new age' expressionless forms conceived in contrast to the aging repetition of expressionism found in past decades." Harmony of Silence (2022) and Roundhouse (2021) are two pieces that prove Tint's ability to devise a distinctive lexicon that integrates her multitude of experiences as a costume designer and artist. Filled with round shapes that wind around the rough canvas, both paintings host a sequence of abutting and sometimes overlapping circles that gather in a play of modular construction.

Life in Action is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog by Snap Editions, with an essay by Robert C. Morgan. For additional information and images: Beatrice Caprioli, beatrice.caprioli01@icatt.it