Abstract Expressionism is an artistic trend that flourished around the mid-twentieth century, centered on the individual’s desire for immediate and spontaneous affirmation through the creative act of painting. During the Second World War, great European avant-garde painters, including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall and Yves Tanguy, moved to the United States, spreading abstract expressionism (the new art form was very successful in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s). The fulcrum of the movement was New York, where two main currents developed: Action Painting and Color-field Painting. The first gave life to works characterized by attention to the materiality of painting and above all to the gesture of painting. The second focused on an extreme research on color, sometimes thickly layered on almost monochrome surfaces.
Jackson Pollock, the best known proponent of Action Painting, made his canvases by “dripping” color to form intertwining lines in a dense and complex arabesque. Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline aimed for rhythm-dominated compositions, which suggested virtually infinite space. Mark Rothko instead preferred Color-field Painting, painting rectangles saturated with color. Many artists, often focused on independent expressive experiments, tried their hand at both techniques, Action Painting and Color-field Painting: among others, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Clyfford Still. In parallel, Art Informel was born in Europe. The term Informel was coined in 1951 by the French scholar and critic, Michel Tapié; it prevails by virtue of its generative force. The informal current continued until about the early sixties of the twentieth century without being completely extinguished thanks to different practices of automatic visual language, and cinematographic developments that recognize the idea of the profound randomness of the artistic gesture. Following the enormous devastation and suffering brought on by the Second World War, it came to express a global sense of fear and transformation in which not even the artists express certainty. It was not a movement in the strict sense, but an atmosphere created in that historical moment.
I believe that today the true heir of this current is the American artist, Gayle Printz, who has expanded the legacy of her great predecessors into a Movement the Contemporary Art World might refer to as new “Modern Abstractionism.” Printz paintings exemplify the atmosphere created in today’s historical moment. Works such as: “ACCEPT,” “MAGIC,” “PONDER,” “WONDER,” “HUMANITY” and “CANDLE” are testimony to how the Artist has been able to devise a new expressive language. Printz’s paintings investigate the contemporary world and, through the reworking of her mind, advance pre-existing themes on canvas. A great creative force, combined with a sign balance and much sought-after color, make her works true “Milestones” of our century. Like all great artists, Gayle Printz creates her own expressive language, a sign alphabet through which to express her thoughts and feelings. In an art world, where cognitive shortcuts optical illusions create financial “compensation,” such as the recent work “COMEDIAN,” a simple banana taped to the wall, and auctioned for more than six million Euros, the painting, and I emphasize the paintings by Gayle Printz, becomes the element from which we must start to refound the concept of Art.
Art has always been based on the concept of creative novelty. Through a series of chromatic bisectors, Printz creates the very concept of novelty. Hers are paintings that investigate the human condition. They are psychological paintings that explore the depths of the human soul. Color becomes the great protagonist of the scene. A color that is never anonymous but, in fact, always manages to characterize current world issues. We can say with certainty that today, through the works of Gayle Printz, Modern Abstractionism has been born. It is a Movement that, more than ever, symbolizes and affirms the current ideology of thought in Contemporary Art.
— A Professional Art Review by Dottore Salvatore Russo, Art Historian and Curator of MASTER ARTISTS TO COLLECT, Gayle Printz: COVER ARTIST, Fondazione Effetto Arte, Priulla Print, Palermo, Italy, January 2025