Marjorie Minkin
American, born 1941Anu, 1997
On view
Acrylic on lexan
Dimensions96 × 60 × 12 in. (243.8 × 152.4 × 30.5 cm)
Anonymous gift, 2000.25
Earlier in her career, Marjorie Minkin was working with thinned acrylic paint on unprimed canvas like Morris Louis and other earlier Color Field painters. However, her paintings, with their distinct shapes, value differentiation, and clear delineation between figure and ground, fell outside the standard formalist practice of Color Field painting. In her earlier work, Minkin was layering colors on an elongated rectangular canvas, continuing her interest in placing a “figure” against a ground. She experimented with a diamond-shaped canvas, and subsequently returned to a traditional rectangular format. The exercise was crucial for her later work beginning with layered, partially painted plastic sheets over painted canvas, and, by 1987, painting on heat-formed sheets of Lexan—an industrial plastic used in ships, skyscrapers, and airplanes.
