Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce that Ruth Pastine’s painting, Blue 12, Depths Series, 2020, has been acquired by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston into their permanent collection. Blue 12 was exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition, Spectrum Depths at Gallery Sonja Roesch in 2021. Ruth Pastine has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and is the recipient of many awards and grants. Works by the artist can be found in numerous private and public collections including the de Young Museum & Legion of Honor, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), TX; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Art and History (MOAH), Lancaster, CA among others.

Pastine’s Depths Series of oil paintings on archival paper were created during social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The heightened visual intensity of these paintings speaks to the urgency of ensuing global conditions of the present moment along with her interests to bring forth and locate luminosity from the depths of the color spectrum, a seemly antidote affording light and hope amidst adversity of worldwide upheaval. Painting on paper presented a new working methodology for Pastine through an intimacy in scale and immediacy in process.

Pastine shares, “My work continues to be a contemplative and reflective investigation, exploring light, phenomena, unpredictability, and confronting the unknown through serial repetition and variation.” Ruth Pastine’s minimalist color-focused paintings challenge phenomena of color perception and the relativity of color, light, and space, emphasizing the viewer’s encounter with the work. The artist’s long-held fascination with contradiction, the interplay of opposites, is explored through complementary color systems and essential tensions that drive her work, the dialectic between the visceral and methodological, presence and absence, materiality of surface and immateriality of light. “My work focuses on heightened perception through the interaction of color, lending itself to phenomenology and raising consciousness towards existential inquiry.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet
Houston, Texas 77005

Acquired into The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston July 2022

Blue 12, Depths Series
2020
Oil on archival paper