Ribbon (Silver), 1967
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches; 91.4 x 91.4 centimeters
LSFA# 12400
June Harwood: Back to the Sixties
January 19 - March 2, 2013
A blue line careens in ever widening circles across a crimson plane. Slivers of chartreuse insert themselves into a carefully sculpted composition of teal and cream. In June Harwood’s meticulously free-wheeling 1960’s compositions, collisions of bright, clean-edged forms are orchestrated to perfection.
Long associated with California Hard Edge painters, Harwood began exhibiting with Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin and Frederick Hammersley in the early sixties. Though the groundbreaking Four Abstract Classicist exhibition in 1959 (men only) served as the launch pad for Hard Edge painting, Harwood’s artwork, along with Lundeberg’s, was included in the subsequent exhibitions and helped define an ongoing evolution of the esthetic.
The artist characterized her intent thusly: “My paint application was uniform, that is to say no brush strokes were evident, creating impeccable flat surfaces. Thus there would be no distraction from the intent…which was to create an interplay of color form; abutting forms which could be read as both positive and negative shapes.” Fresh, exuberant, visually compelling, though the forms are going on fifty, they don’t look a day over today.