Jules Olitski: The Mitt Paintings 1988–1993

This publication examines a transformative moment in late modernist abstraction, when technological innovation and gestural experimentation coalesced to produce works of unprecedented material complexity. Through meticulous analysis of Jules Olitski’s pioneering deployment of Golden Artists Colors’ revolutionary “Interference” acrylics—materials whose iridescent properties enabled a radical reconceptualization of painting—the catalogue illuminates how the Mitt paintings extended the artist’s decades-long investigation of color, light, and surface. Olitski’s seemingly improvisational yet precisely choreographed manipulation of paint through industrial mittens generated richly modulated topographies that destabilized conventional distinctions between pictorial and sculptural space. It also engaged broader theoretical discourse around chance operations, embodied mark-making, and the ontological status of painting in late twentieth-century art.

Building upon Michael Fried’s seminal analysis of Olitski’s modernist practice of the 1960s, Jim Walsh’s incisive essay reveals how the Mitt paintings represent a profound philosophical recalibration of the artist’s relationship to medium specificity and aesthetic autonomy. Through careful examination of fifty key works drawn from this insufficiently studied period, supported by a comprehensive chronology, the publication positions these paintings as the culmination of Olitski’s career-long dialectical engagement with materiality and transcendence, determinacy and chance, manual craft and industrial process. This definitive study, published in conjunction with concurrent exhibitions at Yares Art and Galerie Templon, establishes the Mitt paintings as crucial documents of how one of Color Field painting’s most rigorous practitioners navigated the complex terrain of abstract painting’s possibilities in the twilight of high modernism.

Published by Templon Gallery, Paris and Yares Art, New York, 2024

Essay by Jim Walsh; chronology by Alex Grimley

Designed by Tim Laun and Natalie Wedeking

Softcover, fully illustrated, 88 pages

_{Artworks © Jules Olitski Art Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY}