Richard Pousette-Dart

Pousette-Dart’s process always centered on investigations across media, and he refused to reduce his practice to a single style or format. This allowed him to work with various materials in a range of scales that would enrich and enlarge the meaning of his works, from the most elaborately detailed to the most reduced.

Geometry of Summer brings together a selection of paintings in which Pousette-Dart dramatically reduced structural complexity to investigate the generative manifestations of specific forms: triangles, circles, stadia, rectangles, and squares. These vibrant compositions offer a window into his protean, richly diverse output while underscoring his examination of simplified geometric shapes and their ability to carry universal meaning. In Pousette-Dart’s own words, “It does not matter how an artist works, whether he uses circles or squares or flowers or people. . . it is the inner life of the work which breathes and truly means.”

These large-scale paintings emerged from Pousette-Dart’s decades-long exploration of “significant form”— introduced by Clive Bell in his book Art (1914)—as well as his deep interest in signs and symbols derived from a broad range of cultural histories and his own improvisational methods of building up paint surfaces that are at once both highly physical and evocatively illusionistic. Despite their seemingly simple compositions, the works are all arrived at through intuitive and intensely painterly explorations.

As a young artist, Pousette-Dart began experimenting with elemental forms by hand-cutting and polishing talismanic shapes from plates of brass. These intimate sculptures—his Brasses, which he continued to produce throughout his life—would serve as a lexicon for his painted imagery. The works in Pace’s exhibition combine singular forms, rich gestural surfaces, highly personal mark-making, and subtle gradations of color to imbue geometry with resonant emotion and to celebrate its inherent connection to the natural world. They give form to the way in which we locate ourselves in the world, how we experience it, and, ultimately, how we create meaning from it.

The paintings on view in the gallery’s presentation depict pulsating textured surfaces elaborately built up from staccato brush strokes across the color spectrum that converge into confidently assertive forms—sometimes matching and sometimes differing from the forms of their linen or canvas supports, which range from square and rectangle to the round Red Circle Square (1992). These central shapes are stated with bold clarity in some works, while in others, forms emerge slowly to the viewer, as in the painting from which the exhibition takes its name, Geometry of Summer (1992).

On the paintings’ textured surfaces, flecks of white paint move like plays of pulsating light, highlighted with titles like Dance of the White Flame (1980) and Rising Light (1987–90). The light that emanates from these works, as well as the energized clarity that emerges from seeming fragmentation, links them to the tradition of American Transcendentalism and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. “I strive for penetration, illumination, a significance of form according to my own changing experience in the universe,” Pousette-Dart once said. These works create a range of tonal and spatial effects evoking nature and its harmonies, a constant source of inspiration throughout his life.

The presentation at Pace will run concurrently with Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart, on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut through April 26, 2026. The artist was also recently the subject of the exhibition Poetry of Light at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany.