The Brooklyn Rail

Entering A Hug From The Art World—a two-floor townhouse tucked into West 19th Street—is always a slightly disorienting experience. Unlike most white cube galleries, it is intimate, a little strange, and almost domestic. In the case of Francine Tint’s exhibition, Open Color, that intimacy becomes especially charged. The show is not simply a presentation of luminous abstract canvases; it is also a history lesson in gender, abstraction, and the uneven distribution by which artists are absorbed into, or excluded from, the canon.

Tint’s practice sits somewhere between Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism, though neither movement quite contains it. Her paintings are foremost about color and light, but also about release: the discharge of pigment, of bodily rhythm, of a lifetime of looking and working. In these canvases, pigment and negative space become the leading forces. They do not feel composed in a rigid sense, but arrived at through intuition, meditation, and motion.

On the first floor, the viewer is welcomed by two large-scale paintings, each around fourteen feet long, facing each other: Time Release and The True Deceiver (both 2024). Their scale transforms the townhouse into something much larger, almost expansive. In Time Release, warm tonalities of deep purple, pale yellow, blood orange, pink, and green move across the canvas, shifting as the pigments drip, mix, and bleed into one another. Gestures manifesting from rollers, brushes, pours, and drips remain visible, but their effect is not one of spectacle; Tint’s marks reveal a disciplined process in which chance is carefully held by agency and restraint.

Across from Time Release, The True Deceiver feels emotionally arresting. Watered down purples, bruised reds, soft pinks, and flashes of yellow gather loose washes and translucent swaths, while brushwork moving in varied directions interrupts the surface. Near the center, these gestures begin to form a horizontal line, piercing through the softness of the field. There are splatters, stains, and denser red passages where the paint is applied with greater force. Yet, these moments do not overwhelm the canvas; instead, they activate the composition, wrestling against the softer washes and giving the painting its very tension.

Tint operates in a small studio, with unstretched canvases pinned to the wall and wrapped around the interior when more room is needed. Plastic covers the surrounding surfaces; buckets, rollers, and acrylic paint sit close at hand. These canvases do not emerge from an enormous industrial setting, but from a small room where scale is produced through constraint, physical labor, and bodily intellect. The larger works appear to carry those conditions in their proportions, extending horizontally, long and panoramic, rather than towering vertically. Tint’s process is distinct in this negotiation—her gestures are expansive yet simultaneously shaped by the limitations of space, the reach of the body, and the mediation between release and restraint. Tint moves with and against the canvas, stretching her arm, pouring, dragging, staining, and directing pigment in motions that read almost like choreography.

This is where Tint’s relationship to action painting becomes rather apparent. Her techniques are a nod to Jackson Pollock and the postwar Abstract Expressionists, who treated painting as something immediate, unconscious, and physical. But Tint’s practice is not simply derivative of those predecessors. There is spontaneity and improvisation, yes, but in these newer pieces, the negative space of the canvas has become central. The exposed ground is not empty; it gives the gesture its air, its interlude, and its rhythm.

At eighty-three, Tint has described this moment as “the best time of my life,” and that sentiment is palpable throughout the exhibition. Her current recognition comes after decades of persistence in an industry that did not always make space for women operating with the same rigour, ambition, and scale as their male peers. Tint was close to major figures and working at the same time as Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, Brice Marden, Andy Warhol, and many others, but proximity and equivalent merit did not always mean equal footing. The art world of the 1960s and ’70s was, in many ways, a boy’s club.

As one continues through the show and makes their way up the staircase, the second floor shifts in scale but not in force. Carnival (2026) greets the viewer with an explosive synthesis of reds, oranges, and smoky atmospheric passages. Color becomes dominant here, almost bodily, blooming outward from the saturated center. There is a tussle between chromatic density and atmospheric openness, between concentrated force and softer tonalities that dissolve around them. Even with this density, the watered-down acrylic creates a sense of lightness, as though the painting is still breathing through the washes.

In Emerald City (2026), green dominates, but not in one register. It shifts between vivid brightness and darker interior structure, crossed by lines that give the work an astute sense of spatiality. Nearby, Gem (2025) feels more opaque and luxurious, with burgundy tones, darker passages, and gold applications gliding across the surface. There is a subtle nod to Tint’s earlier career as a costume designer, especially in the layering of sartorial materials and the way color is assembled, exposed, and partially concealed. Paint is layered almost like fabric, with surface and transparency functioning together. The smaller pieces are tighter and more controlled than the large canvases, but they are still deeply intuitive—light yet rich, controlled yet open, intimate yet expansive.

What makes Open Color so exciting is that it does not appear like a late-career summary. Tint does not expect these works to be seen only as evidence of endurance. They feel self-actualized, unapologetic, and alive in our ever-changing present moment. Tint has lived multiple lives—as a stylist, costume maker, a fixture in New York’s nightlife scenes, and as an artist navigating a male-dominated art world—but the show does not reduce her to autobiography. Instead, it shows an artist who kept working because she knew, long before the institutions fully caught up, that no one else was making what she was creating.