Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art

Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime

Saturday, May 16 – Sunday, August 2, 2026

Ruth Pastine is internationally recognized for her minimalist color field paintings and multi-panel installations through which she explores the phenomenological experience of color, light, and space. Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles. 

Pastine’s work is based in geometric abstraction and minimalism. She extends the sensibilities of the 1960s Southern California Light and Space movement with key differences, such as her focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and her reliance on traditional means of probing the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint applied with brushes. She evolves her artworks through series, invoking a contemplative connection between the works and the architectural spaces they occupy. Creating an immersive viewing experience, Pastine heightens perception through resonant color relationships. Her luminous canvases engage her philosophical interests in the sublime, furthering the tensions that drive her practice: materiality and immateriality, the known and the unknown, the finite and the limitless. 

The exhibition debuts Lightscapes, a series of large-scale paintings on canvas and a suite of powder chalk pastels on paper, alongside additional new works such as the six-panel Presence Absence spectrum, the Light as Air triptych, and a selection of Depths Series oil paintings on paper. Also featured are selected works from the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art’s permanent collection by John McLaughlin and Josef Albers, two of Pastine’s noted early influences, whose hard-edge abstract paintings provide a counterpoint to her soft-edge investigations into color, luminosity, depth, and perception.

 

Plan your visit, access helpful insights on site, and dive deeper into your favorite works with our free digital guide on Bloomberg Connects.

Exhibition Archive

An archive of past exhibitions from 2016 to present.