Staccato brushstrokes weave rich purples, aquamarines, maroons, and oranges together, creating a blanket through which cobalt pierces with an icy effect. Pat Passlof’s Untitled is an expression of the artist’s ingenious use of color and form. It constantly builds, resolves, and rebuilds tension, as the viewer's eyes are pulled to the crisp presence of the blue before eventually relaxing back into the comfort of the painting’s warmer colors. A student of Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College and the spouse of Milton Resnick, Passlof primarily made semi-abstract biomorphic forms throughout her early career. Untitled represents her shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s to complete abstraction, a period during which her experimentation with form and color transcended, becoming characteristic of a once-in-a-generation colorist. Change is inherent to Passlof’s work; she understood it to be both natural and essential, writing in a letter to one of her students at Richmond College, “as we go we seem to get ‘better.’ what excited us once is only mildly interesting now. What we struggled with last spring, we take for granted in the fall” (Pat Passlof, To Whom the Shoe Fits: Letter to Young Painters, 2018, p.8). This constant pursuit of evolution and exploration eventually led her later work into the realms of geometric abstraction and mixed-media collage.

Like many of the incredible female artists of the 1950s and 60s, Passlof’s work was largely underappreciated at the time of her death in 2011. However, since her passing, her oeuvre has been reconsidered to recognize the full extent of her artistry and vision, with her work included in the 2016-2017 travelling exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism, and being collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Executed in 1961, Untitled is a long-overlooked triumph; a painting by a masterful artist whose work, once largely unknown, now demands recognition for its brilliance.