Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance documents an exhibition of the artist’s large-scale paintings made between 1960 and 1992.

This catalogue documents an exhibition of large-scale paintings by Helen Frankenthaler made between 1960 and 1992, opening in spring 2026 at Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler pushed beyond the boundaries of easel painting to create extraordinary, monumental works, some of which occupied the entire expanse of her studio floor. This exhibition explores the artist’s use of scale across four decades of painting. The title is derived from a 1975 review by poet and critic Barbara Guest, where she remarks on Frankenthaler’s “astonishing combination of freedom with restraint, extravagance with discipline, suggestion and definition,” concluding, “the moment becomes the distance.” The book includes a new essay by art historian Ara H. Merjian that discusses the works in the show in the context of Frankenthaler’s Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist influences.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of New York-based postwar abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, and her highly personal references to figuration and landscape.

About The Author

Ara H. Merjian is an art historian and professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. He has written and edited several books, including Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (2024), Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960–75 (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2027). His most recent volume, Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s Other America, is due out with Verso in 2026.