Untitled from The Hero Leaves His Ship

Grace Hartigan was an American abstract expressionist painter whose large-scale canvases combined gestural brushwork with bold color fields and compositional urgency. Active from the 1950s onward, she was among the few women painters in the postwar New York School, developing a practice rooted in spontaneous action painting while maintaining structural clarity. Her work oscillated between pure abstraction and figuration, often incorporating references to art history and urban experience. Hartigan exhibited widely and maintained an independent artistic voice distinct from her male contemporaries.

Newark, United States