This fall, Nagas opens an exhibition dedicated to Amaranth Ehrenhalt (1928-2021), spanning four decades of the artist’s work, from the 1950s through the 1990s. Bringing together paintings and works on paper from both New York and Paris, the exhibition traces a career that unfolded across two of the great centers of postwar art.
Amaranth Ehrenhalt belonged to the group of Abstract Expressionists in New York in the 1950s before establishing herself in Paris. There, she befriended and exhibited alongside other American expatriates working in abstraction, such as Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Shirley Jaffe. Moving between these two cities, Ehrenhalt developed a language that combined the chromatic rigor of Parisian abstraction with the improvisational gesture of the New York School.
Born in Newark, Ehrenhalt studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Barnes Foundation, where she absorbed Cézanne’s structural compositions and Matisse’s color harmonies. In New York, she frequented the Cedar Tavern, where painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline gathered. Her early paintings reveal a similar intensity of gesture and freedom of form, yet with a lyricism uniquely her own.
In Paris, Ehrenhalt immersed herself in an international community of painters and writers. Sonia Delaunay became both mentor and friend, and their conversations about color and rhythm deeply informed Ehrenhalt’s work. Her canvases of the 1960s display a dynamic interplay of transparency and density, a visual music that mirrors the improvisational cadence of jazz — one of her lifelong passions.
This exhibition presents a selection of key paintings and works on paper that span the full arc of her career, including vibrant large-scale compositions from the 1960s. Together, they reveal an artist who continuously reinvented herself while remaining committed to the immediacy of paint and the autonomy of color.
This exhibition continues Nagas’ commitment to presenting artists who played a significant role in their time yet have since been overlooked: figures whose rediscovery reveals how rich and complex the history of 20th- century art truly is.
