Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm will present ‘Olitski Paintings’, a forthcoming exhibition of late works by Jules Olitski running from 25 August to 4 October 2026. The gallery says the show is the first presentation of Olitski’s late paintings in Sweden and will include canvases made between 1989 and 1993.
The exhibition is drawn from what the gallery calls Olitski’s ‘Mitt’ paintings, a distinctive series that emerged in 1988. According to the gallery’s announcement, the series began with a painter’s mitt that Olitski’s wife had bought to paint an iron fence on their property. Olitski became interested in the object’s possibilities and started using it as a tool for making art, applying acrylic gels and paint directly to canvas with sweeping gestures.
Wetterling Gallery describes the mitt as central to the paintings’ layered surfaces, where colors appear to merge and intertwine. The gallery also notes that the series marked Olitski’s use of newly developed interference pigments, whose transparent and pearlescent qualities cause shifts in hue and luminosity as a viewer moves around the works. In the gallery’s framing, the results are large, commanding canvases that are richly material yet luminous.
Olitski is identified by the gallery as one of the foremost figures of postwar American abstraction. The exhibition text recalls his rise to prominence in the 1960s as a central voice in Color Field painting, where he helped free color from drawing so that it could operate across the canvas as pure sensation. It also places the late paintings in relation to the denser, more physical work of the 1970s and 1980s, when he built paint in heavily textured impasto and layered pigment until the surface became almost sculptural.
The gallery’s exhibition materials situate the late period as a deeply personal one and describe the paintings as charged with spiritual intensity. Among the works listed on the exhibition page are ‘Ancient Paradise’ (1990), ‘Ark Measure’ (1990), ‘Beauty of the Women of Asher’ (1989), ‘Beauty of Vashti’ (1989), ‘Boom’ (1992), ‘Center Unbound’ (1993), ‘Dance of Amram’ (1990), ‘Dance of the Daughters Continued’ (1990) and ‘Heaven’s Half’ (1990), all shown as acrylic on canvas.
Additional listed works include ‘House Angel’ (1993), ‘Moonlit Silence’ (1991), ‘Naked Goddess Shimmy’ (1992), ‘Pillars of Light’ (1991), ‘Shekinah Love’ (1990), ‘Sun Throne’ (1991) and ‘Weaver’s Kiss’ (1992). The gallery page gives Wetterling Gallery’s address as Nybrogatan 20, Stockholm, and notes free entry. An opening is scheduled for Tuesday, 25 August, from 5 to 7 pm.
