Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment

During her long and prolific career as a painter, Jaffe developed a unique formal language that was characterized by several radical breaks with her own style. The “gestural abstraction” that Jaffe practiced in her early years draws largely on intuition and feeling, for example, in large-format paintings executed in quick, spontaneous brushstrokes. She began to shape the structure of her paintings with vibrant color. Around 1968, Jaffe took an even more radical approach, introducing clearly defined surfaces, calligraphic lines, and an inexhaustible variety of colors into her compositions. Yet another phase began from the 1980s on, as she started to explore the full potential of white, particularly its power to add tension to her geometric compositions.