Hermine Ford: The Fractured Field: Paintings from the 1970s at Nathalie Karg Gallery
Hermine Ford, Untitled (525-75), 1975, Oil on canvas, 33 x 90 1/8 in (83.8 x 228.9 cm)
The Fractured Field: Paintings from the 1970s
November 7 - December 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 6-8PM
Nathalie Karg Gallery
127 Elizabeth Street
NYC
New York, NY - Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Hermine Ford: The Fractured Field, a presentation of rare paintings from 1970s by Hermine Ford (b. 1939). This marks the gallery's second exhibition with the artist.
Largely unseen since the 1970s, these works offer crucial insight into the pivotal period of Ford’s signature abstract vocabulary and experimentation with the contours of her canvas supports. These compositions feature delineated fields of atmospheric color and iterative strokes contained within larger, geometric structures resembling film strips or design swatches. Ford creates a tension between these cropped containers by means of their heterogeneity as well as unresolved borders that threaten spills into adjacent areas. Her more unruly impulses are hedged against the works' Post Minimalist affinity for aggregation and geometry.
The works in this exhibition are largely defined by their elongated formats. Their horizontality and delineated sections, such as in the monumental Untitled (357-74) (1974), indicate a sequence of events, and ask the viewer to discern the hums and harmonies made possible by successive notes of varying color and surface. As Carter Ratliff wrote in Art International regarding a summer 1976 exhibition at Artists Space: “What holds these works together is the restrained (often witty) echoes from one section to the next.”
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a pivotal time for Ford. She had finally begun to see herself as a painter in earnest, and established her studio in Tribeca with her late husband, Robert Moskowitz. She found like-minded artist friends including Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett, and allowed herself the freedom to find her own painterly language.
These early works are the Rosetta Stone of Hermine Ford’s entire oeuvre, and showing them installed together for the first time offers an entry point into Ford’s unique synthesis of gestural painting with geometric constraint. Their modular compositions foretell the mosaic-like compositions that characterize Ford’s later work based on classical artifacts and ruins. The exhibition offers scholars, collectors, and the public a rare opportunity to study the origins of Ford’s enduring aesthetic, highlighting a powerful body of work previously known only through archival documentation.
About Hermine Ford.
Hermine Ford (b. 1939, New York) developed her distinct artistic style beginning in the early 1970s, informed by her studies at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the RISD Museum, Providence. She continues to live and work in New York City and Nova Scotia.