Ruth Pastine

Ruth Pastine’s minimalist works address phenomena of color perception. In seamless gradients, often composed with nuanced admixtures of complementary hues, Pastine’s surfaces appear to pulse toward their edges. The luminous color is built up with countless brushstrokes taking months to complete.

Pastine’s work emphasizes the event of the viewer’s encounter with the painting. Art writer Peter Frank observes: “Ruth Pastine … achieves a persuasive intensity in her paintings by approaching them with physical and intellectual fervor. … The work, after all, must seem to ‘happen’ before the viewer’s eyes even as it must seem to have always existed. As immaterial as they are, Pastine’s paintings are the realest things we can see.”

Pastine became interested in color theory through the work of chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and his systematic study of color perception. Color relativity— the perception of influence between adjacent colors—has remained a subject in Pastine’s paintings and works on paper over the course of her artistic trajectory.

Born in New York City, Pastine studied at Cooper Union (BFA, 1987), the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Hunter College (MFA, 1993). Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, and is included in many public and corporate collections including: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego – MCASD, CA; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Lancaster Museum of Art and History – MOAH, CA; Brookfield Properties, Ernst & Young Plaza, Los Angeles, CA; AXA Art, Cologne, Germany; Qualcomm, San Diego, CA, CIM Group Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA, among others.  Her public commission, Limitless, is installed in the adjoining lobbies of the Ernst & Young Plaza in Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in Southern California.