The American artist Marcia Hafif set out to reinvent painting. She began her career in a style close to abstract expressionism before moving to Rome, where she lived from 1961 to 1969. She was struck by the streets, churches, advertisements, and road signs she encountered in Italy, developing a new pictorial lexicon in a vibrant palette. Her paintings explore symmetry and repetition in shapes and counter-shapes. Yet her work is by no means locked into abstraction untethered from reality; rather, it gestures to everyday imagery that is never calcified into a single meaning. Her Rome paintings are replete with rounded shapes hinting at womanly curves and the silhouettes of Etruscan ceramic ware.

Returning to New York in the early 1970s, Marcia Hafif realized that abstraction seemed to have lost its vitality. Pursuing her creative practice meant reinventing her art. She shook off all sources of subjectivity in her painting, including patterning, to focus on its most elemental aspects of pigment and tools in interaction with the support. Her research led her to monochrome, which she considered not as an end in itself, but as a new departure. She began listing each of her works in an Inventory, categorizing her output in series by experiments with medium, pigment, and support. Olivier Mosset contacted her in 1978 and together they founded the Radical Painting group, which soon became a hub for other like-minded artists.

Marcia Hafif’s paintings reflect her intellectual process, using paint and painting to explain painting itself, as if its act and nature could be explained by its means and media.

Marcia Hafif was born in Pomona, California, in 1929 and died in Laguna Beach, California, in 2018.