“Grace Hartigan’s art involves many of the cogent questions of modernism. These include the relationship between past art and the avant-garde, the heritage of Abstract Expressionism, creation of a personal set of painterly symbols, the interaction between high art and popular culture, image verses abstraction and the distinctive characteristics of a woman’s vision.”

- Robert S. Mattison, “Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World”

Renowned for her formative participation in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, Hartigan’s mixed media collages and gestural watercolors build upon the associative mark-making of her abstract paintings. Tracing their lineage from an early practice often integrated with visionary signifiers, these works extend from the artist’s lifelong devotion to expressionistic line and color—siphoning from the collective unconscious a personal rubric of representational symbols.

Hartigan began making watercolor collages, which were unique to her practice, in the 1960s and the medium became so important to her that she called it a “second expression” from the 1980s onward. Watercolor particularly suited her at this time because it resembled the manner in which she was using thin, transparent oil glazes in her recent canvases. Some collages act as echoes of Hartigan’s large scale oil works. Barbara Guest Archaics (1968), references a series of lithographs the artist made in the 1960s, each responding to poems by New York School poets and collaborators, including Barbara Guest. These collages combine the abstract elements and lyricism of her early work with her desire to be free to work with any subject material.

C. Grimaldis Gallery has proudly represented Grace Hartigan’s work and estate since 1979. Hartigan’s work is represented extensively in private and public collections worldwide including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is featured in Mary Gabriel’s biography, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art.