GalleryViews / Midtown

Another is that the paintings contain the tonal effects created when the paint bled into the canvas, staining it, but the prints simply read this as hard-edged flat black.  So, though closely based on the black paintings, the prints stand successfully on their own.

The screen prints were included as part of the huge Pollock retrospective at MOMA in 1998 but this exhibition offers a great opportunity to highlight this work. The show breaks out into two categories of work: the 6 large prints based on the paintings and several smaller pieces consisting of only one or a couple of colors. In some ways the smaller pieces hearken back to Pollock�s work prior to his drip paintings where the forms were more blocked out and determined. Given the familiar grand scale of the paintings, it is interesting to see the imagery reduced to more intimate proportions. Rather than presenting encompassing environments, the prints are more removed and contained. The experience is to see them as

Jackson Pollock Screenprints Installtion View

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Jackson Pollock, Untitled (M13), 1944, screenprint, 5.5 x 8.5 in

pictures on a wall rather than as heroic painting.  These observations are not meant to suggest a value judgment between the two approaches, but simply to distinguish them.  Each offers something uniquely different and engaging from the other.

Jackson Pollock Screenprints Installtion View

Another aspect of this work is that, primarily due to the nature of the medium, the prints are far more reductive. Given the rich layering that Pollock builds into his painting it must have presented 

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (M13), 1944, screenprint, 5.5 x 8.5 in

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