Jules Olitski (1922-2007), an American abstract painter and key member of the initial group of Color field painters. Known throughout his career for exploring new materials and techniques in painting, Jules Olitski’s prolific and wide-ranging experiments in medium became his signature.

The four paintings on view here were made by Olitski between 1966 and 1974, a radically innovative period in the artist’s career. In the early 1960’s he pioneered using a spray gun to apply paint, laying down atmospheric blankets of colored spray on canvas, marked at first by barely discernible value changes near the edge of the picture. Referred to by scholars as « edge drawings », these works use the technique of offsetting monochrome fields with strokes of varying color at the margin. His intention was to create paintings that looked like « nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying there ».