Ruth Pastine

Ruth Pastine (born 1964) is an American artist known for abstract minimalist paintings that explore the phenomenological experience of color, light and space. Critics relate her art to the Southern California Light and Space movement, while identifying key differences, such as its focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and its reliance on basic, traditional means (brush, paint, pastels) rather than synthetic-industrial materials. In these regards, writers trace her artistic lineage to Monet and Malevich—who sought to capture light's ineffability—and to Abstract Expressionist and Color field painters such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who probed the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint. Pastine's paintings typically consist of seamless gradating bands or fields of color built in layers with countless brushstrokes, which optically coalesce and appear to pulse, float, dissolve, or glow as if backlit.

Pastine has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) and the Carnegie Art Museum. Her work belongs to the public collections of SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Phillips Collection, and de Young Museum, among others. She lives and works in Southern California.

Early life and career Pastine was born in New York City in 1964 and raised in the East Village, Manhattan. She developed an early interest in art, and during her attendance at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan determined she would become an artist. She continued at Hunter College (MFA, 1993), working with Vincent Longo, Robert Morris, Robert Swain and Sanford Wurmfeld. and gained attention for solo exhibitions at Brian Gross Fine Art (1996, 1998) and Haines Gallery (2000) in San Francisco, Deven Golden Fine Art (New York, 1998),

In her later career, Pastine has had solo shows at Brian Gross (2008–20), and Edward Cella Art + Architecture (2009–19) and Ace Gallery (2016–17) in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles, Donald Kuspit, among others, has noted a "dialectical" engagement with various dichotomies in Pastine's work: presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, undifferentiated and differentiated, objective reality and subjective perception.

Early work (1990s–2004) Pastine's early paintings were small-scale, minimalist, nearly monochromatic works whose rigorous formal systems employed closely valued complementary colors that merged almost imperceptibly within the iconic square format favored by the Russian Suprematists. New York Times critic Ken Johnson noted the new saturated hues in the former series—"stainy, monochrome pictures [that] vary in color from candy purple to salmon orange to taxicab yellow"—which were mixed wet-into-wet to create an ambiguous sensation of "glowing from within." The "Red Green Series," meanwhile, often used subtler hues that San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker wrote, created "improbable, hypnotic sensations of color as both objective and dematerialized." The painting surfaces appear to dematerialize in context with one another, evoking a visceral, inherent tension; that quality is accentuated by custom-designed, deeply beveled stretchers that cause the paintings to appear to float or glow, an effect Pastine would continue to use in her work. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, She has received grants from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (1999) and Shifting Foundation (2000), and a residency from the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (2018).

Pastine has been commissioned to create public art projects for the Ernst & Young Plaza (Limitless, 2009) and CIM Group Headquarters (The Inevitability of Truth, 2015) in Los Angeles, and for the United Airlines Polaris lounge at the Los Angeles International Airport (2019), among others.