Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present an exhibition in Brussels devoted to some thirty works on paper by Shirley Jaffe, produced between 1955 and 2012. Ten years after the American artist's death, this presentation carries particular resonance in the wake of the recent passing of her brother, Jerome Sternstein, an unwavering supporter and tireless champion of her work. A parallel presentation devoted to Shirley Jaffe's paintings is on view at the Paris gallery from 30 January to 25 April 2026.
These two exhibitions form part of the growing institutional recognition of her work, which has continued to gain visibility since 2016. They follow the major travelling retrospective first presented at the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou (2022), then at the Kunstmuseum Basel (2023), and subsequently at the Musée Matisse (2023-2024). This momentum has been accompanied by a number of major acquisitions by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Morgan Library in New York, the MFA Houston, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and the Musée d'arts de Nantes. Established in 2025, the Shirley Jaffe Foundation now supports the catalogue raisonné project led by the art historians Olga Osadtschy and Jelle Imkampe.
The exhibition brings together gouaches and silkscreen prints on paper, underscoring their central role in Shirley Jaffe's creative process. Far from being mere preparatory studies, these works have been described by the art historian Pierre Wat as a 'second chronology', unfolding alongside her painting as a fully autonomous field of experimentation. Paper offers the artist an immediate freedom: instinctive decisions, suppleness of gesture, and thought in action unfold with an intensity that painting tends more readily to contain.
The works of the 1950s and 1960s bear witness to Shirley Jaffe's grounding in post-war gestural abstraction. Born in the United States in 1923 and trained at the Cooper Union School in New York and the Phillips Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C., she settled in Paris in 1949. She soon moved within a circle of American and European painters engaged in the renewal of abstraction, among them Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Kimber Smith, and Al Held. Although she shared with them the legacy of abstract expressionism, she very early on forged a singular path, attentive to urbanity and to the transformations of the modern city. The fragmented, interlocking forms reflect this attentiveness to urban visual flows: each element forms part of an evolving system grounded in constantly recalibrated tensions and balances.
Her stay in West Berlin in 1963-1964 marked a decisive turning point, on paper as in her painting. Her formal vocabulary became more condensed, her areas of flat colour more geometric, and her colour relationships more rigorous. On paper, however, this evolution retained an element of fragility: imprecise contours lent the works a poetic and sensitive instability. These works thus became a privileged space in which to test balances, refine structures, and explore the tensions between order and dissonance.
From the late 1970s onwards, and through to her final works, Shirley Jaffe developed a singular language grounded in sharply delineated forms and bold planes of colour, often described as 'Matissean'. Through precise control of the relationships between lines, surfaces, and intervals, she fashioned a frontal, autonomous mode of painting, freed from the classical coordinates of verticality and horizontality. White became an active field, connecting the elements while setting them in tension. Appearing in the late 1980s¹, her silkscreen prints further extend and enrich her formal and chromatic investigations. In the works of the 2000s, this vocabulary reaches a form of culmination: a lucid architecture in which balance arises precisely from tension.
Considered an essential bridge between American and European abstraction in the post-1950 period, Shirley Jaffe's work has exerted a lasting influence on younger generations, among them Robert Kushner, Fiona Rae, David Reed, Mary Heilmann, Peter Halley, and Jessica Stockholder. Since 1999, Galerie Nathalie Obadia has remained committed to the artist and her Estate, investing with conviction and determination in the preservation and promotion of this major artistic legacy. Following the passing of Jerome Sternstein, Nathalie Obadia wishes to extend her warmest thanks to his wife, Trina, and his two daughters, Adria and Ava, for the trust they have placed in her in continuing this collaboration.
About the Shirley Jaffe Foundation and the catalogue raisonné
The Shirley Jaffe Foundation is dedicated to the preservation, study, publication, and dissemination of Shirley Jaffe's work. As part of this mission, the Foundation supports and initiates projects designed to deepen public knowledge and understanding of her oeuvre.
The Foundation has launched a catalogue raisonné project to document, honour, and protect the artist's work, and to ensure that her contribution to modern and abstract art is studied and presented with the utmost scholarly rigour.The catalogue raisonné project is led by the art historians Olga Osadtschy and Jelle Imkampe. The Foundation invites collectors, institutions, and anyone holding information about, or works by, the artist to get in touch at the following address: info@shirleyjaffefoundation.org
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¹ First appearing in the late 1980s, her silkscreen prints were presented as a body of work for the first time in a solo exhibition at Galerie Jean Fournier in 1997, under the title Sérigraphies.
