RED, RED, RED · TWO x TWO

Working in New York as a painter since the 1960s, Doug Ohlson developed his signature style of stained vibrant canvases along the emergence of Color Field painting and Minimalism. Ohlson’s most recognizable canvases feature rectangles of color floating above hazy fields, as seen here in Red, Red, Red. His skill with color is evident in the bars of radiant turquoise, mustard yellow, chartreuse and magenta over two fields of red. Ohlson further activates the space of the canvas with muted washes behind each slab of color, alternating warm and cool tones that build an internal rhythm within the painting. In 2002, a retrospective of 20 years of his painting was installed at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, where he had worked as a professor from 1964–2001. His work was included in The Art of the Real: 1948-1968, MoMA’s groundbreaking 1968 survey of Minimalism and Color Field Painting. Ohlson’s paintings are in numerous institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; and the Whitney Museum, New York.