Helen Frankenthaler : Move and Make

Exhibition at the Reinhard Ernst Museum, Wiesbaden, 16 March – 5 October 2025

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was one of the leading figures in post-war abstract art in the United States. Her radical approach to painting and materials makes her images vibrate with colour. Her highly personal ‘soak-stain’ technique, which allows the paint to seep directly into the untreated canvas, results in a unique pictorial effect: spaces of colour open up, merge into one another, sometimes saturated, sometimes transparent.

This exhibition catalogue brings together nearly fifty works from the Reinhard Ernst Collection and offers a comprehensive overview of the world's largest private collection of works by Helen Frankenthaler. These paintings bear witness to an artist willing to take risks: by imposing no limits on her artistic work, she was able to create liberated, large-scale paintings full of brilliance. Her revolutionary work opened up new horizons for painting and remains highly relevant today.