Renowned for her formative participation in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, Hartigan’s paintings from the latter decades of her career blend figurative content with her signature sensibility of vibrant color, active gesture and painterly freedom.

Tracing their lineage from an early abstract practice often integrated with visionary signifiers, these canvases extend primarily from the artist’s career-long devotion to expressionistic line and color. Featuring subjects such as dolls, courtesans, nobles, film stars and chimerical creatures, Hartigan builds on the associative mark-making of Abstract Expressionism to siphon from the collective unconscious a personal rubric of representational symbols. Infused at once with the process of their own making and with a subject matter frequently drawn from past myths, Hartigan’s later works create a new moment of non-linear time in which fantasy can be used in the service of, as the artist has stated, “understanding the life you are living.”

C. Grimaldis Gallery has proudly represented Grace Hartigan’s work and estate since 1979. Hartigan’s work is represented extensively in private and public collections worldwide including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is currently on view in Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Palm Springs Art Museum.