Now Open: Ruth Pastine's Technicolor Sublime Exhibition

From now until Sunday, August 2, 2026, visit the Weisman's latest exhibition, Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime. Internationally recognized for her minimalist color field paintings and multi-panel installations through which Pastine explores the phenomenological experience of color, light, and space, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles.

Pastine’s work is based in geometric abstraction and minimalism. She extends the sensibilities of the 1960s Southern California Light and Space movement with key differences, such as her focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and her reliance on traditional means of probing the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint applied with brushes. She evolves her artworks through series, invoking a contemplative connection between the works and the architectural spaces they occupy. Creating an immersive viewing experience, Pastine heightens perception through resonant color relationships. Her luminous canvases engage her philosophical interests in the sublime, furthering the tensions that drive her practice: materiality and immateriality, the known and the unknown, the finite and the limitless.

The exhibition debuts Lightscapes, a series of large-scale paintings on canvas and a suite of soft pastels on paper, alongside additional new works such as the six-panel Presence Absence spectrum, the Light as Air Series, and a selection of Depths Series oil paintings on paper. Also featured are selected works from the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art’s permanent collection by John McLaughlin and Josef Albers, two of Pastine’s predecessors, whose geometric hard-edge abstract paintings provide a counterpoint to her soft-edge investigations into color, luminosity, depth, and perception.