Joan Mitchell was one of the leading figures of second-generation Abstract Expressionism, renowned for her gestural brushwork, vibrant color fields, and deeply lyrical approach to abstraction. Working between New York and later Paris, Mitchell developed a visual language rooted in memory, emotion, and the natural world, drawing inspiration from landscapes, poetry, and music.

“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.” - Joan Mitchell in an interview for Nature in Abstraction, Whitney Museum, 1958.

Today, Joan Mitchell is recognized as one of the most significant painters of the postwar era. Her work has been celebrated in major retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2021–22), the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2022). Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of leading institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

‍