Jack Roth’s Untitled (1981)

Painter Jack Roth (American, b. 1927) pioneered abstraction through the midcentury, developing a distinctive visual voice with both line-based and color field works (and combinations thereof) that exemplify the eras in which he worked. As color field painting steered the cutting edge of American abstraction away from the aggression and metaphorical speed of action painting and toward a reflective, submersive sense of color, Roth experimented with the borders between fields of color, and wordless, pictureless compositions that gave a sense of floating calm. By the 1980s he had created hundreds of color field works, notably scaling both to monumentally large canvases and much more intimate, smaller scale surfaces that most abstractionists of his generation did not much explore. 

This pair of works, individually available, were created together in 1981. Water-based media overlap and absorb into a 100% cotton paper substrate. Each is signed and dated in pencil, recto. Following our recent acquisition of these pieces, they’ve been beautifully reframed, float-mounted to emphasize the deckled edge of the paper and a composition that reaches to every corner.