Nathalie Karg Announces Landmark Exhibition of Early, Never-Before-Seen Works
New York, NY— October 17, 2025 - Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to announce The Fractured Field, a historically significant exhibition presenting a selection of paintings by Hermine Ford (b. 1939) exclusively from the 1970s. This marks the gallery's second exhibition with the artist.
These works, largely held in the artist's private collection for nearly five decades, offer crucial insight into the pivotal decade where Ford forged her signature abstract vocabulary, bridging the painterly tradition of the New York School with the material and structural inquiries of Post-Minimalism. The 1970s was a period of intense experimentation in downtown New York, and Ford, whose father was the Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov, established her own studio in Tribeca. Breaking free from the traditions of her predecessors, Ford engaged directly with contemporary debates surrounding the nature of the picture plane.
These powerful, yet previously unseen, paintings directly illuminate how Ford positioned her work at the forefront of abstraction during a decade defined by radical creative experimentation among female artists like Elizabeth Murray, Lynda Benglis, Jennifer Bartlett and Kazuko Miyamoto.
A defining feature of the exhibition is Ford’s early adoption of the shaped canvas. These horizontal and often elongated oil paintings, such as the monumental Untitled (357-74) (1974), challenge the rectangular frame, emphasizing the canvas as a physical object rather than a mere window. Ford used these atypical formats to suggest landscapes, maps, or architectural shards breaking across the wall.
The paintings reveal Ford’s developing interest in geometry and patterning, anticipating her later thematic preoccupation with artifacts, mosaics, and ruins. Subtle grids and linear structures fight against broad, atmospheric fields of color, creating a dialectic between order and disruption. Ford’s use of raw canvas, oil, and sometimes graphite and gesso in these early pieces underscores the tactile, low-key materiality favored by artists moving beyond Color Field painting toward a more visceral, object-oriented form of abstraction.
These 1970s works are the Rosetta Stone of Hermine Ford’s entire oeuvre, and showing them installed together for the first time offers a vital historical correction, revealing how Ford used the very structure of the canvas—cutting and shaping it—to invent a personal terrain. The merging of gestural painting with geometric constraint in this period solidifies her role as a foundational voice in contemporary abstraction and the history of the shaped canvas. The exhibition offers scholars, collectors, and the public a rare opportunity to study the origins of Ford’s enduring aesthetic, highlighting a powerful body of work previously known only through archival documentation.
About Hermine Ford:
Hermine Ford (b. 1939, New York) developed her distinct artistic style beginning in the early 1970s, informed by her studies at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the RISD Museum, Providence. She continues to live and work in New York City and Nova Scotia.
