Ross + Co is pleased to present Jules Olitski: The Mitt Paintings 1990–1993, at the gallery’s Palm Beach location. The exhibition, on view January 31–February 17, 2026, will showcase twelve paintings by the painter and sculptor Jules Olitski—one of the foremost and innovative artists from the American Color Field movement.

Begun in 1988, the Mitt series constitutes a distinctive and transformative phase in Jules Olitski’s oeuvre, reflecting the culmination of decades of material and chromatic inquiry and marking a decisive moment in his sustained engagement with the limits and possibilities of abstract painting. This body of work embodies Olitski’s rigorous experimentation with paint, surface, and perception at a moment when he was among the earliest artists to incorporate newly developed iridescent and “interference” acrylic pigments supplied by Golden Artist Colors, a pioneering manufacturer of artist materials.

Characterized by their sumptuous, low-relief surfaces, the Mitt paintings derive their name from the industrial painter’s mitts Olitski adopted as his primary tool. These mitts—initially brought into his Bear Island studio by his wife—enabled the artist to apply interference pigments combined with thick gels in sweeping, choreographed gestures on canvases laid horizontally on the floor, producing surfaces that oscillate between painterly facture and sculptural presence. The process was neither prefigured by preparatory sketches nor governed by predetermined composition; rather, the works record a series of spontaneous, visceral decisions executed directly with the paint-laden mitts.

The optical qualities of the interference pigments are central to the series’ phenomenology: translucent and pearlescent, they shift in hue and luminosity in relation to changes in light and viewpoint, such that color and form appear to emerge, recede, and recombine across the surface. Many of the paintings were further refined through the application of fine mists of sprayed color at oblique angles, accentuating the interplay of light, shadow, and material relief.

Within Olitski’s broader trajectory, the Mitt works can be situated at the intersection of the Color Field tradition with which he has been historically associated and a later, more materially assertive practice that challenges the conventional dichotomies of two-dimensional painting. While earlier phases of his career emphasized expansive fields of pigment applied in subtle atmospheric gradations, the Mitt series foregrounds the tectonics of surface and gesture, probing the ambiguous boundary between surface and depth and engaging the viewer in an embodied act of visual perception in which effects of color and texture cannot be apprehended from a single vantage point.

Presented infrequently during Olitski’s lifetime, the Mitt paintings have been the subject of recent concentrated exhibitions that foreground their technical ingenuity, chromatic complexity, and theatrical presence within the history of post-war American abstraction. 

Born in 1922 in Snovsk, Soviet Russia, Olitski emigrated a year later to the United States, settling with his family in Brooklyn. Olitski attended Pratt Institute, the National Academy of Design, l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and New York University. Among other achievements, Olitski became a pivotal figure in the Color Field movement alongside artists including Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella. Jules Olitski’s work has been exhibited extensively in major museums worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Portland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where, in 1969, he was the first living American artist to have been awarded a solo exhibition. His paintings are held in numerous prestigious public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Tate Modern, London. 

Jules Olitski: The Mitt Paintings 1990–1993 will be on view at Ross + Co Palm Beach January 31–February 17, 2026. The gallery is located at 238 Worth Ave, Palm Beach, FL, and is open to the public Monday–Saturday, 10am–6pm. For more information or images, contact info@rosscogallery.com.