Working in New York as an artist since the 1960s, Doug Ohlson developed his signature style of vividly stained paintings alongside the emergence of Color Field and Minimalism. Ohlson’s most recognizable canvases feature rectangles or globes of color floating above hazy fields, seen here in an example from his Dot Painting series. A sublime example of his skill, the apricot, gray, olive, and cyan circles glow within the rich rose canvas, each heightened by its interaction with its surroundings. The saturated hues hover in ambient space, transporting the viewer into the work. 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.
