Robert Motherwell: Surface/Subject
Olney Gleason is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Robert Motherwell in collaboration with The Dedalus Foundation. On view at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, from February 19 to March 28, 2026, the exhibition highlights Motherwell’s distinctive approach to developing his compositions, through a combination of bold gestures, varied surface textures, and overlapping planes of color.
Across painting, collage, printmaking, as well as other mediums in which he worked, Motherwell animated his surfaces with a wide range of blacks, juxtaposed in areas of varying density. This endowed his oeuvre with enormous force and intensity: the subjects of his paintings emerge in large measure from the dynamism and intricacy of his painting process.
Motherwell often worked on his paintings over extended periods of time, and he used the color black in especially rich and evocative ways – sometimes as a dense single pigment, applied without tonal modulation, and sometimes in translucent veils, which both enshroud and reveal their subjects. An example of this method can be seen in The Forge, 1965-1966/ 1967-1968, which Motherwell transformed – repainting the right side in dense black to give greater emphasis to the blue area around the central triangular form – after its debut in the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting at the Museum of Modern Art, 1966-67.
Motherwell's works mobilized abstraction to register a broad range of both intimate feelings and social consciousness. The personal expression of tension and tragic grief in many of his works is significantly related to his political commitments – particularly his lifelong engagement with the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, which he identified as a defining moral event of his generation. These feelings are vividly expressed in his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, one of the most iconic bodies of paintings in the post-War era. A significant work from this series, Untitled (Elegy), 1975, which has been in the same private collection for half a century, will be on view in a gallery exhibition for the first time. Spanish Painting with the Face of a Dog, 1958/59/60, is also an especially prominent inclusion in the exhibition. It was shown in Motherwell’s 1965 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was organized by Frank O’Hara, and it was recently included in the artist’s 2023 retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which traveled to the Kunstforum Wien.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new text by London-based writer Matthew Holman, as well as archival images that document Motherwell’s successive returns to individual works. A series of public programs, to be held in the gallery space over the course of the exhibition, will be announced in the coming weeks.
About the artist
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) graduated from Stanford University in 1937 and later continued his graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. In 1940, while Motherwell studied briefly at Columbia University, the art historian Meyer Schapiro encouraged him to pursue painting rather than scholarship. Following a 1941 voyage to Mexico with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Motherwell fully committed to painting as his primary vocation.
In 1944, Motherwell was granted his first one-person show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. Soon after, he became the leading spokesperson for avant-garde art in the United States. Throughout the 1950s, Motherwell lectured widely on abstract painting and held professorships at Hunter College in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenneth Noland, all of whom would become deeply influenced by Motherwell’s rigorous academia and extensive knowledge of literature and philosophy. In 1961, Motherwell exhibited in the sixth São Paulo Bienal, and he was awarded his first major New York retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by his close friend, renowned writer and art critic Frank O’Hara.
During the 1970s, Motherwell was the subject of numerous significant retrospective exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh and London. In 1983, a major retrospective of Motherwell’s work was mounted at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which subsequently traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York. Another retrospective was presented in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Fort Worth in 1991.
In 2022, the Menil Collection opened the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s drawings ever staged, Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself, at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas. The exhibition celebrates the publication of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings, prepared by the Dedalus Foundation, New York.
In 2023, The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas, staged Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting, organized by Susan Davidson. The first presentation in more than a quarter century to fully examine the mastery of the artist, the exhibition travelled to Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna through January 2024. In 2025, the New York Public Library staged Robert Motherwell: At Home & In The Studio, celebrating a gift from the Dedalus Foundation of prints by Robert Motherwell as well as books from the artist’s home donated by his family.
