CURATOR'S SELECTION:
Colour Field

Emerging in the mid-twentieth century, Colour Field painting marked a decisive shift in abstraction, moving away from gesture and figuration toward expanses of pure, unmodulated colour. Associated with critics such as Clement Greenberg, who championed its emphasis on flatness and optical experience, the movement proposed that painting could exist as an encounter: direct, immediate, and unburdened by representation. Artists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Helen Frankenthaler explored how colour alone could evoke sensation, atmosphere, and emotional resonance, inviting viewers into a contemplative space defined not by narrative, but by perception itself. In Canada, this language of abstraction found distinct expression through artists such as Kenneth Lochhead and his contemporaries in the Regina Five, who adapted Colour Field principles into works that balanced formal clarity with a sensitivity to place and scale.

In this Curator’s Selection, we consider how colour operates as both subject and experience across generations of artists. Kenneth Lochhead’s large-scale canvases from the 1960s exemplify the movement’s foundational concerns, where broad planes of colour establish a spatial and emotional field that is at once immersive and precise. Sylvia Tait’s paintings and silkscreens from the 1960s and 70s extend this dialogue through subtle shifts in hue and structure; her compositions balancing geometry with a lyrical sensitivity to surface and rhythm. Tom Burrows’ practice brings Colour Field into a contemporary context: his cast polymer resin panels transform colour into a material presence, where translucency, depth, and light create an almost architectural experience, while his ceramics translate these concerns into form, surface, and objecthood. Across these works, colour is constructed, layered, and activated through its relationship to light, space, and material.

This Curator’s Selection invites us to reflect on our own experience of colour: how it shapes our perception, our mood, and our sense of presence. Does colour feel immersive or distant? Meditative or energizing? As these works demonstrate, Colour Field painting is not only a historical movement, but an ongoing inquiry into how we see, feel, and inhabit the spaces that colour creates.