Richard Pousette-Dart

Geometry of Summer

On View
Jan 16 – Feb 28, 2026
New York

Pace will present Richard Pousette-Dart: Geometry of Summer at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from January 16 through February 28, 2026. The show will spotlight a selection of works created by Richard Pousette-Dart between 1974 and 1992 within the light-filled, natural environs of his home and studio in Rockland County, New York.

Building on the gallery’s 2022 exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart: 1950s Spirit and Substance in New York, this presentation focuses on the final two decades of the artist’s life, in which he continued to explore the complex relationships between light and form, the physical and the visual, and the body and the spirit. Geometry of Summer will be the seventh exhibition dedicated to Pousette-Dart mounted by Pace since the gallery began representing his estate in 2013.

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, as in The Burning Square (1979–80). 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 Golden Door (1989–90) 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.

Geometry of Summer by Richard Pousette-Dart

Black Circle, Time by Richard Pousette-Dart

Light on the Water of Venice by Richard Pousette-Dart

Presence, Meditation by Richard Pousette-Dart

Confluent Spacial by Richard Pousette-Dart

Into the Universe Golden by Richard Pousette-Dart

About the Artist

Although he avoided affiliation with any particular movement, Richard Pousette-Dart is closely associated with the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and forged his own path throughout his long career, achieving a cohesive body of work with expressive form, color, and gesture. He participated in the pivotal Subjects of the Artists and Studio 35 groups, which were key to defining the New York School. Pousette-Dart was the first of these artists to create a mural-sized easel work (Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, 1941–42, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), prior to other Abstract Expressionists’ adoption of large formats. He drew inspiration from varied sources including Native American and Oceanic art, as well as Asian philosophy and American Transcendentalism. Never embracing action painting and instead pursuing his own aesthetic, Pousette-Dart aspired to universal significance in his art, expressed through nonobjective means.

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