For the first time, the gallery will present a monumental work from Joe Overstreet’s Facing the Door of No Return series. Overstreet (1933–2019) was an artist and activist who pushed the boundaries of painting through decades of experimentation, embedding his abstractions with the Black experience. He is the subject of a survey exhibition organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, that is traveling to the Mississippi Museum of Art and opening November 1. The Menil survey includes other examples from the Facing the Door of No Return series, marking the first time in thirty years that works from this series are on view. In 1992, Overstreet spent two weeks in Dakar, Senegal. While there, he visited Gorée Island, which had functioned as a slave-trading depot on the African coast for three centuries until its closure in 1848. On the island, he walked through the House of Slaves, where a warren of cells culminated in the infamous “Door of No Return”—a narrow portal to the sea from which captured Africans were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Deeply moved by the experience, on his return to New York, Overstreet began a group of monumental paintings, collectively titled Facing the Door of No Return. The paintings reflect but also transcend their subject, turning pain into beauty. He invoked the landscape of Senegal through the paintings’ materiality. By mixing oil paint with beeswax, he gave the surfaces a luminosity that evokes the country’s hot, dusty sunlight.

At Frieze Masters, the gallery will show paintings by Sari Dienes (1898–1992), marking the artist’s debut with the gallery following a representation announcement in August of this year. Dienes was a groundbreaking experimental artist whose career links European Surrealism, American Neo-Dada, and Pop art. She is best known for her mixed media frottage paintings (painterly rubbings from textured surfaces) of rural and urban environments. Dienes’s foremost artistic belief was that raw materials and forms exist everywhere, and her goal was to see and reflect them. This attitude influenced her younger contemporaries and friends, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. 

Pat Passlof (1928–2011) created abstract paintings that responded to memory, experience, and place. Over the last five years, her paintings have entered the collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum (Bentonville, AR), along with the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). In 1948, Passlof studied with Willem de Kooning at the famed Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. This summer proved pivotal for her trajectory as a painter. In the 1950s, she became a fixture in the downtown New York art scene, attending meetings at The Club – a gathering of Abstract Expressionists – and eventually organizing “The Wednesday Night Club” as an alternative to the male-dominated original. She co-founded the artist-run March Gallery on Tenth Street and married fellow painter Milton Resnick. Her major painting, Around the Corner (1983), is a highlight of the gallery’s presentation at Frieze Masters. Its rhythmic brushwork and thickets of paint reflect Passlof’s belief in the call-and-response process between the painter and the canvas.

Elise Asher (1912–2004), a painter-poet, incorporated calligraphic text within atmospheric clouds of brushwork. Asher was the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery in Fall 2023, which re-introduced the public to her work and established a significant market. The personal style of these linear abstractions was Asher’s unique contribution to post-war abstraction. Asher was also a noted poet who published three volumes of poetry; her poetry is used in numerous paintings, which nevertheless are suggestive rather than literal and legible. 

Martha Edelheit’s work traces a trajectory from abstraction to paintings foregrounding the female gaze. In the late 1950s, Edelheit (b. 1931) established herself in the center of the downtown avant-garde, becoming a member of the Tenth Street artist-run space, the Reuben Gallery. There, Edelheit first exhibited her “extension” and “projection” paintings which break the frame of the work and utilize utilitarian objects. Impasto paint and found materials are combined in constructions characterized by their raw energy. A work from this latter series will be on view at Frieze. In the 1960s, Martha Edelheit began working from models in her studio, seeking to contribute to an art historical lineage she deeply admired but also recognized was dominated by men, for men. A major painting is currently on view in the exhibition Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Thomas Sills (1914–2000) was a Black artist who created a significant body of abstract paintings that respond to process, natural phenomena, and universal forces. The paintings, which have a delicate and unusual palette, synthesize the figure/ground relationship with optical equivalencies between colors, and free-flowing, outwardly-radiating patterns.

Sills, who grew up in Castalia, North Carolina in a large family, was not exposed to art or art-making in his youth or young adulthood. He began to paint—almost clandestinely—in his late 30s when he became immersed in the avant-garde scene of New York, and went on to be the subject of four well-received solo shows at Betty Parsons Gallery between 1955 and 1961. His work is also held by a long roster of significant museums across the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all in New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA.