Ruth Pastine

Ruth Pastine’s minimalist works address phenomena of color perception. In seamless gradients, often composed with nuanced admixtures of complementary hues, Pastine’s surfaces appear to pulse toward their edges. The luminous color is built up with countless brushstrokes taking months to complete.

Pastine’s work emphasizes the event of the viewer’s encounter with the painting. Art writer Peter Frank observes: “Ruth Pastine … achieves a persuasive intensity in her paintings by approaching them with physical and intellectual fervor. … The work, after all, must seem to ‘happen’ before the viewer’s eyes even as it must seem to have always existed. As immaterial as they are, Pastine’s paintings are the realest things we can see.”

Pastine became interested in color theory through the work of chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and his systematic study of color perception. Color relativity— the perception of influence between adjacent colors—has remained a subject in Pastine’s paintings and works on paper over the course of her artistic trajectory.

Born in New York City in 1964, Pastine earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 1987. She was awarded a travel and research grant to attend the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Netherlands where she lived from 1987 to 1988. Pastine later attended Hunter College where she received an MFA in 1993. Ruth Pastine has exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, and is included in many public and corporate collections. She is the noted artist of Limitless, a large-scale public commission, comprised of eight monumental paintings currently installed in the adjoining lobbies of Ernst & Young Plaza in Los Angeles. In 2001, Pastine relocated from New York City to Southern California where she currently lives and works.