To Define a Feeling: Joan Mitchell’s 1960–1965 Canvases Return to New York

David Zwirner will present a concentrated selection of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell that map a brief but pivotal arc in her practice. Drawn from public and private lenders as well as the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the presentation centers on the five-year span in which Mitchell loosened earlier structural armatures and moved toward more exploratory composition. The exhibition is curated by Sarah Roberts, Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Positioned as a hinge between Mitchell’s landscape-anchored formats and her later painterly architecture, the works from these years often organize around a dense, swirling core—predominantly in layered blues and greens—set against thinner veils of color. The tension between compression and openness becomes the organizing principle, as chromatic depth and gestural turbulence share the same field.

Mitchell’s studio life in Paris coincided with extended voyages along the Côte d’Azur with painter Jean Paul Riopelle. Time on the water, living for stretches on a sailboat and studying the shifting horizon, informed the canvases indirectly. Rather than depict specific views, she restructured sensations of glare, distance, and coastal fracture into a vocabulary of centralized constellations and ruptured strokes. The horizon recedes as a scaffold; atmosphere becomes structure.

Contemporaries registered the change. The period’s canvases were described as meditations on fragments of landscape and air, aligning with the exhibition’s emphasis on process over motif. Color masses, accelerations of stroke, and the intervals between them carry the emotional load, displacing any single site or storyline.

Mitchell’s own remarks provide a compact key: she sought something that could not be verbalized—“to define a feeling.” The show takes that ambition seriously. Layers of paint accumulate, are partially erased, then reassert themselves; embedded reds and violets surface through dominant blues and greens, testing the stability of the image and registering memory as a persistent undertone rather than a subject.

The installation clarifies the interplay between structural and technical shifts. Thick, elastic strokes interrupt scumbled zones; percussive clusters meet long sweeps of the brush. Compositions gravitate toward the center without conceding a single focal point, holding a workable balance between restlessness and order. The paintings’ internal weather—gusts, stalls, sudden clarities—reads as an operational logic rather than a metaphor.

By restricting the lens to 1960–1965, the presentation isolates the moment when Mitchell moved beyond landscape as subject while retaining its atmospheres and temporalities as structuring forces. It is a compact argument, made on the surface of the works themselves, for how sensation, memory, and method converged to redirect her pictorial thinking.

Venue and dates: David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York — “To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965,” curated by Sarah Roberts. Exhibition dates: November 6–December 13, 2025.