American artist Jules Olitski's practice was centered around colour and its capacity to convey pure sensation. Working initially in oil and later with acrylic on large canvases, Olitski poured, sprayed and rolled paint across the surface, allowing colour itself, rather than line or form, to carry the emotional and physical weight of the painting. His work often dispenses with a defined image altogether, instead building atmospheric fields of colour that seem to hover, glow or dissolve at the edges, created intuitively through layered veils of pigment and shifting tonal relationships.
Elements are built up, sprayed through, and reworked, with the surface itself becoming a record of process, colour saturating the canvas as both subject and material. Rooted in the tradition of American Color Field painting, Olitski's work emerged from Abstract Expressionism and helped define Post Painterly Abstraction, alongside painters such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, bringing a singular focus on colour, light and surface that would come to define his contribution to postwar American painting.