Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime

Saturday, May 16–Sunday, August 2, 2026

Opening Reception Saturday, May 23, 2026 from 4–6 PM

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.

About the artist: 

For more than 40 years, Ruth Pastine has pursued a phenomenological investigation of visual perception, which she explores through the materiality of painting and the elusive qualities of light’s ineffability.  

Pastine (b. 1964, New York City) received her BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and her MFA from Hunter College. In addition to being the recipient of many grants and honors, she was awarded a postgraduate residency at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, and an independent fellowship in Florence, Italy. Her paintings are included in numerous world-renowned public institutions and private collections. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Ojai, California.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime is the international release of Ruth Pastine: Limitless, a 20-year monograph published by Skira, which situates the artist’s work in the context of 20th - and 21st-century painting, abstraction, minimalism, and perceptual art in relation to Light and Space.

 

Pictured Above: Blue 3, Lightscapes series, 2025, oil on canvas on beveled stretcher, 90 x 48 x 2.5 inches. Image courtesy of Ruth Pastine.