Rothko: Dark Palette

Black in Deep Red, 1957
"Mark Rothko was a great artist with highfalutin aims, which he summarized, in 1956, as 'tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.' That’s a lot to claim for fuzzy rectangles on paper or canvas. But at least the 'and so on' holds true. No other painter can occasion feelings so intense, so directly. His pictures are emphatically objects. They are in scale with a viewer’s body, but their color and brushwork have a disembodying effect. You may endorse the artist’s terms for this flustering tension, at a risk of tipping sensation into sentimentality. But his best work will unsettle even a skeptic’s rational ken. The drama persists, though with diminished power, in 'Rothko: Dark Palette,' at the Pace gallery (on view through Jan. 7), a show that is long on doom. ..."
New Yorker: The Dark Final Years of Mark Rothko
NY Times: Mark Rothko’s Dark Palette Illuminated
PACE
“Neither Flesh nor Fleshless”