Portals of Transcendence
Helen Frankenthaler, Freya Fang Wang, Anna Pakosz, Meryl Yana
Portals into Transcendence, guest curated by Claudia Cheng, brings together the work of Helen Frankenthaler with paintings by Anna Pakosz, Freya Fang Wang, and Meryl Yana. At the centre of the exhibition is a work by Frankenthaler, whose experimental approach to abstraction, particularly her soak stain technique, redefined the relationship between pigment, canvas, and gesture. The works by Pakosz, Wang, and Yana were developed in response to Frankenthaler’s painting and engage with its openness to chance, its sensitivity to materials, and its understanding of the canvas as a site of transformation. Through distinct processes, including porous textiles, layered surfaces, and pigments derived from organic matter, the artists extend this legacy in contemporary terms. Portals into Transcendence presents painting as a space where material, gesture, and perception continually unfold.
Portals of Transcendence presents Frankenthaler’s Grey Fireworks (2000) alongside contemporary works by Anna Pakosz, Freya Fang Wang, and Meryl Yana. Curated by Claudia Cheng, the exhibition frames abstraction as a site of change, where painting operates as a threshold between material and immaterial states. In this context, the contemporary practices gathered here extend and reconfigure Frankenthaler’s attention to process, each developing a distinct approach to surface, transformation, and pictorial construction.
Helen Frankenthaler is widely regarded as a key figure in post-war American abstraction. Beginning in the early 1950s, she developed her soak-stain technique, pouring diluted pigment directly onto unprimed canvas laid on the floor. This method allowed paint to soak into the canvas like porous skin, generating fields of colour that seem to breathe and pulse across the surface. Her work is fundamentally concerned with how painting produces spatial effects through the interaction of colour, line, and material, holding flatness and spatial expansion in a dynamic equilibrium.
Anna Pakosz works through staining processes on unprimed surfaces, where dye, rust, and material degradation contribute directly to pictorial structure. The image emerges through physical interaction rather than predetermined compositional intent.
Freya Fang Wang approaches painting through contingent processes informed by Taoist concepts of Wu Wei. Composition develops through responsiveness to material conditions, with less emphasis on control or prior definition.
Meryl Yana employs chemically reactive materials that introduce variability into the painting process. Her works foreground transformation as a structural condition, where pictorial outcomes are determined through material change over time.
Across Portals of Transcendence, abstraction is understood as a material practice through which spatial effects remain in continuous formation, as each artist articulates a distinct relationship between surface, process, and transformation.
The exhibition is on view at Night Café, 162 New Cavendish Street, Fitzrovia, London from 30 April to 23 May 2026, with a private view on 29 April 2026.
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