A river of raw canvas cuts across the vast expanse of this orange painting. "I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted," Frankenthaler has said. "That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.” In this work, the artist experimented with different ways to produce line: the thin, spindly black lines that radiate from the central cluster of shapes are drawn, but she also used color to create line, as the edges of the orange paint demonstrate. In these subtle manipulations of line, color, and canvas, Chairman of the Board is a meditation on the formal qualities of painting itself.
Gallery label from 2009.
