Inner Suns / Psychedelic comets   

JULES OLITSKI

b. 1922, Snovsk, Soviet Union (now Ukraine); d. 2007, New York City




Jules Olitski’s early Color Field paintings don’t sit quietly on the wall — they detonate. A chromatic combustion. A slow planetary exhale. Flaring stars in the night expanding into atmosphere breathing pigment into space. Stand close and you’re orbiting a private solar system.Step back and you’re witnessing galaxies collide. The cosmos — or perhaps a secret choreography of multiplying atoms the microscopic pulse of matter dividing becoming dissolving. These paintings hum with suspended gravity — color released from drawing freed from edge liberated from narrative. Pigment hovers like vapor. It stains like memory. It radiates like heat rising off a desert highway at dusk. There are no hard answers here.No fixed horizon. Only thresholds. Each canvas is a question asked in light.Controlled burns. Invitations to dissolve. Enter slowly. Let the color pulse.

— E.L.







ABOUT 

Jules Olitski   

Born in revolution. Raised in Brooklyn. Marked early by light. He arrived in America as a child after his father — a Soviet commissar — was executed before he was even born. History came first. Painting followed. At seventeen, he stood in front of Rembrandt van Rijn at the 1939 World’s Fair and felt the switch flip. Not a hobby. A calling.  He trained hard — New York academies, army service, postwar Paris — studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and under Ossip Zadkine. Early on, his canvases were thick, muscular — nods to Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Then something shifted.  The paint thinned. The surface opened. Color stopped sitting on the canvas and started entering it. Alongside Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, Olitski helped define Color Field painting, but he pushed it further. He poured. He stained. Then he picked up a spray gun.  Atmosphere over gesture. Radiance over brushstroke. Accident welcomed. The spray allowed color to hover — soft yet explosive, resisting the slick finish of commercial perfection. These weren’t decorative fields. They were weather systems. He went on to show more than 150 exhibitions. Represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. Earned a solo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, only the third artist to do so. The spotlight dimmed in the ’80s. The influence didn’t. Today, the work still hums, fields of suspended light, paint behaving like atmosphere, history dissolving into pure sensation.  

- EYE LIKEY 

- Special Thanks to the Jules Olitski Foundation, The Guggenheim and Yares Art   





























"What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of color that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape."  - Jules Olitski