EXHIBITION // JOAN MITCHELL // DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY // NEW YORK

© Installation view, To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960-1965, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960-1965 - 06 Nov. to 13 Dec. 2025

David Zwirner Gallery
537 West 20th Street
New York

www.davidzwirner.com

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

“That particular thing I want can’t be verbalized.... I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.” - Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

The years 1960 to 1965 marked a crucial turning point in Joan Mitchell’s career, following her decision to settle permanently in France in 1959. Moving back and forth between New York and Paris throughout the 1950s, Mitchell found in the French capital a sense of autonomy that had eluded her in the United States.

Immersed in the Parisian artistic milieu yet maintaining strong ties to New York, Mitchell deepened the emotional and formal complexity of her paintings. The early 1960s thus represent a moment of consolidation and transformation—when Mitchell, newly anchored in France, began charting a distinctly different course from that of her peers in both Europe and the United States.

“These seasons in the South of France were highly social and the most family-oriented phase of Mitchell's adult life.... Many artists, curators, and gallery owners also summered in the area, part of a broader upsurge in Mediterranean travel in the 1950s and 1960s that brought everything from artists seeking exposure to classical culture on a modern version of the grand tour, to the formation of bohemian artist colonies.”—Sarah Roberts, in the exhibition catalogue for Joan Mitchell, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2021–2022

During these years, Mitchell spent many weeks each summer living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France's Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and coastal sites. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow.