Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Marcia Hafif: Select Work from “The Inventory,” 1967–1998. Illustrating the singular focus of experimentation into the process of painting and its meditative nature, this exhibition is itself an investigation into Marcia Hafif’s deliberate and meticulous practice driven by the insatiable curiosity at the center of the late artist’s more than fifty-year career. This presentation surveys Hafif’s core oeuvre, tracing the evolution of her practice from the 1960s through the end of the century.

Hafif referred to her entire body of works as “The Inventory,” “a listing by series of works in the approximate order they appeared”[i], contemporaneously logging and briefly summarizing each series as it developed. Now “The Inventory” serves as the artist’s archive. Select examples from key series chronicling Hafif’s explorations from this thirty-one-year period, including the “Italian Paintings”, “Mass Tone” painting, “Transparent Painting”, “Roman Painting”, “French Painting”, and “Red Painting” series, are represented in this show. At the start of each series, Hafif devised a system that defined her process and approach within that respective body of work.

The earliest works in this show are two “Italian Paintings” titled 156 (September 1967) and 183 (December 1967). Hafif wrote about this series extensively: “…the ‘hill shapes,’ involved a rising shape starting from the width of the bottom edge as though a line had been stretched from lower corner to lower corner, varying in its height and form as it rose or fell. Of all the images I worked with in Rome, [this was] the one most significant to me…. What the hill shape meant to me I am not sure; it is just that paintings of mine based on this shape seemed to be more ‘mine’ than any other.”[ii] Through a consideration of competing form and color, and devoid of the brushed personality inherent to many of Hafif’s later works, the “Italian Paintings” establish a co-occurring sense of order and experimentation which persist throughout the artist’s career.

Cobalt Blue, from 1974, represents Hafif’s “Mass Tone” series. In this body of work, Hafif explored the tonal elements contained within a single, unmixed pigment, hand mulled by the artist on a glass plate into linseed oil-based paint. Hafif wrote: “In doing this I found a beauty in the colors beyond what I had ever seen in tube paint.”[iii] Methodical strokes appear vertically throughout the picture plane, and tones beyond strict cobalt – pink, aqua, deep cerulean – emerge, achieving a mesmeric perceptual tension.

In the 1984 “Transparent Painting” Rose Madder, Hafif took an inherently looser, more expressive approach to painting than she did in much of the rest of her oeuvre. Using a thinned paint she described as “not quite a glaze” brushed in multiple directions across the canvas, she enabled “lighter areas to remain uncovered.”[iv] Geometric forms emerge and recede across the picture plane, reflecting the physicality of the act of painting. Triangular zones of thinly applied pigment ricochet across the surface, and a spiral pushes from right to left at the upper limits of the image. In this series, Hafif’s free-flowing gestures alternate between opacity and transparency, emphasizing the import of light and density as they relate to the painted image.

In her “Roman Painting” series, panels of silken, humming flesh tones recall the colors of the Italian city where Hafif once lived. The pigments she used – including in Roman Painting XVIII (1988), the vertically-oriented diptych in this show – allow for subtle, naturalistic shifts in tone across each panel. Hafif wrote that, in this series, she worked “all over the canvas several times”[v]; the artist’s vertical strokes are neatly rendered in salmon, periwinkle, yellow, and pink-greys, abutting and overlapping one another throughout. While still working on the “Roman Paintings,” Hafif was invited in 1988 to paint in Lyon, France, “another Roman city,”[vi] as she noted. In the "French Paintings" series that ensued, represented by Angagneur (1991) in this exhibition, "the colors were more subdued, violet, more northern. I used flesh tones inflected with the cooler sky."[vii]

The latest works in this show, Heliogen Blue and Indian Yellow Tint, both 1998, from Hafif’s “Red Painting” series, evolved out of the earlier “Mass Tone” paintings. “On canvases middle sized and larger, I used my own handmade paint…. During an uninterrupted time and with a small 3/4-inch brush, I applied paint left to right and top to bottom.”[viii] In this series, the artist expressly centered the application of paint to support; she conceived of the “Red” works as using a structure not simply related to an ocular, chromatic experience, but as related to the process of making the painting itself. These pieces were often but not always rendered in red tones; Heliogen Blue and Indian Yellow are two non-red pigments Hafif employed in this series.