Ruth Pastine (b. New York City, 1964; lives and works in Ojai/Los Angeles) is best known for her minimalist color field paintings and multi-panel installations that extend the sensibilities of the 1960s Southern California Light and Space movement. For more than forty years, Pastine has pursued a phenomenological investigation of visual perception, which she explores through the materiality of paint and the elusive and relative qualities of color, radiance, and depth. Her luminous canvases engage her philosophical interests in the sublime, allowing for direct experience and heightened perception through resonant color relationships. The fully illustrated monograph Ruth Pastine: Limitless situates the artist’s work in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century painting, abstraction, minimalism, and perceptual art in relation to Light and Space through an examination of the tensions that drive her practice: materiality and immateriality, the known and the unknown, the finite and the limitless. Ruth Pastine: Limitless also contributes new scholarship from practitioners who demonstrate a longstanding commitment to contemporary painting, Light and Space, post-war abstraction, and minimalism, and to the growing swell of critical interest in women artists who have been historically influential but underrepresented and lesser known internationally.
Ruth Pastine received a four-year scholarship to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City for her B.F.A. (1987). She is the recipient of many grants, commissions, and honors including a post-graduate residency to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1987-88) and graduated from Hunter College, New York City with her M.F.A. (1993). Ruth Pastine’s paintings are included in numerous world-renowned public collections including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA. Selected corporate collections include: AXA Art, Cologne, Germany, Brookfield Properties, Ernst & Young Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, CIM Group Headquarters, Los Angeles, CA, Luminate, San Francisco, CA, PIMCO Global Headquarters, Newport Beach, CA, Proskauer, Washington, D.C., Qualcomm, San Diego, CA, Tarsadia Investments Headquarters, Newport Beach, CA, United Airlines LAX, Los Angeles, CA, UNICEF, New York, NY among others. Pastine lives and works between Los Angeles and Ojai, CA.