Robert Natkin NY

Findlay Galleries is pleased to present a comprehensive exhibition of Robert Natkin paintings featuring important paintings from the artist’s most desirable periods.

Natkin created some of the most innovative color abstractions of the late 20th century. Populated by various formal elements including stripes, dots, grids, and free-floating forms, his light-filled canvases are sensuous, playful, and visually complex. Natkin was the subject of a major monograph written by British art critic Peter Fuller, who aptly described his paintings as a “veil on the infinite.”

Born in 1930, Natkin studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he found inspiration in the color and patterns of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse and drew a lifelong interest in emotional content from Paul Klee’s oeuvre. Natkin moved to New York where his reputation was enhanced with his inclusion in Americans Under 35 at the Whitney Museum in 1960, the first of several museum exhibitions during his career. He enjoyed critical and commercial success for several decades and lived in Redding, Connecticut, with his wife and fellow artist, Judith Dolnick, until his death in 2010.

Over the course of his long career, Natkin was widely recognized for successfully achieving his stated goal of “making paintings that are more interesting tomorrow than they are today.” His paintings are in the collections of several prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).