The show’s theme seems simple at first: really big paintings.

To be a bit more specific, paintings measuring at least 100 inches in one dimension or another (or both!), made between 1960 and 1992 by Helen Frankenthaler, one of the all-time greats in American abstract art.

But the 22 works in “Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance,” which opened last week at Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery in New York, are not just heroic in scale. They trace the artist’s personal and stylistic evolutions across four decades, starting several years after she invented her famed “soak-stain” method and moving through periods of dreamlike washes, weightier palettes, and built-up surfaces.

“She tended to be pretty experimental as she went along,” says Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. To highlight the effects of such experiments, the Gagosian show is hung chronologically—the first time that Jason Ysenburg, a director at the gallery, has done so in the 10 Frankenthaler shows he’s organized over the years.

The earliest two works, Alassio (1960) and Provincetown I (1961), were each made with oil-based paint and leave a large swath of canvas raw. They have the clearest connection back to 1952’s Mountains and Sea, the first painting to employ her soak-stain technique of pouring thinned oil paint directly onto unprimed canvas—a method that went on to influence a whole generation of abstract painters and which paved the way for the color field movement.

One of my favorite little quirks in the show is the stitched detailing along the right edge of Alassio. The fabric’s original purpose was likely not for art—it might have been a bedspread or a tablecloth. The painting would have been started as Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, the Abstract Expressionist painter to whom she was married from 1958 to 1971, were traveling in Italy. She was on the move and used what she could find.

There are other surprises in store for even the most devout Frankenthaler fans. “We wanted to do an ambitious show that hadn’t been seen before, of works that have been very often tucked away,” says Ysenburg. Several of the paintings have seldom, if ever, been on display to the public, as Frankenthaler kept many of her favorites for herself at home or in storage, even up until her death in 2011, at age 83.

“It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, I didn’t sell it,’” Ysenburg explains. “It was very much about, ‘No, I don’t want to sell it. I want to keep it.’ And Gamut is a perfect example of that.”

The 11-foot-tall Gamut, from 1968 and painted with acrylics, marks a significant departure from the earlier works in the show. A river of purple tumbles down against tinges of tangerine, the two colors playing off each other with unexpected velocity. Ysenburg thinks it hasn’t been on public view since 1969, when the influential curator and critic Henry Geldzahler put it in a group show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lucky us that it’s back out in the world. It’s a knockout.

Next to Gamut is another from 1968, titled Moontide, a sumptuous painting of blue, peach, and ochre and one of three Frankenthaler paintings that inspired Ulla Johnson’s spring 2026 collection. Along with the verdant Hint From Bassano, from 1973, it epitomizes the softness and lyricism that is often associated with her work—though apparently to Frankenthaler’s chagrin; she found it “very wrong” that the word lyrical was so often used to describe her paintings, as she felt they went deeper.

Her paintings from the 1970s were mostly made after she and Motherwell split. Her colors become more saturated, as seen in works like the sunny Mornings (1971) and teetering Thanksgiving (1972). To these she added back lines, drawn with marker, that remind me of shoelaces or ribs. Ocean Drive West #1 (1974), a wide expanse of blue with the colors of a setting sun streaked in, captures the moments of serenity that can accompany loneliness.

By the mid-’70s Frankenthaler was an undeniable force in the New York art world, having shown her work in top galleries and museums alongside other heavy hitters. She had her first solo museum show in 1960, when she was just 31 years old—a pretty stunning achievement for any young artist, and especially for a woman in those days. Her 1969 Whitney Museum retrospective solidified her fame: Reviewing it in The New York Times, Hilton Kramer called the show “genuinely illuminating” and Frankenthaler “one of our best painters.”

But rather than rest on her success, she kept pushing into new territory. “The no-rules thing with her, it was very important,” Ysenburg says. She started experimenting with other tools: a dampened sponge, attached to the end of a stick; squeegees to guide the pooling of color; metallic paints.

“There was a sort of combined rigor and spontaneity in the way she made all of her paintings,” says Smith. You really see this in the works from the 1980s and ’90s: Water Shadows (1988), with its circles, dots, and bands, has a bit of a Surrealist feel and brings to mind Miró. The latest work in the show, Borrowed Dream (1992), builds up to a thick, blurry smudge in the style of Gerhard Richter or Jack Whitten.

Though Frankenthaler did repeatedly reference art history in her work, she maintained a style all her own, and these later paintings especially have a distinct visual language. “They don’t look much like anybody else’s work,” says Smith. “Some of them are kind of peculiar.”

Coming face-to-face with paintings of such size and power emphasizes that Helen Frankenthaler was a woman of gusto. At least some of her confidence came from her privileged Manhattan upbringing. “She was treated as an adult or [taken] seriously from the beginning, from the age of 10. She knew what she wanted,” says Ysenburg.

Her skills were encouraged by her family and nurtured in school; at Dalton she was taught by the esteemed Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo. Even painting at a large scale had seeds in childhood: When she was 15 she made a life-size portrait of the family’s maid, painted on cardboard.

But really her confidence came from her talent. She believed in her abilities, securing her first solo gallery show in 1951 when she was a fresh-faced Bennington grad. It took chutzpah, swimming with the sharks of Abstract Expression as a young woman.

There are other occasions to take in Frankenthaler’s genius this spring. Over in Switzerland, Kunstmuseum Basel has recently opened an expansive exhibition of more than 50 works, with a special focus on Frankenthaler’s references to art history in her paintings. And closer to home, the midtown Manhattan gallery Yares Art has the riveting “Similitudes: Color, Form, Friendship,” which explores the rich friendship between Frankenthaler and the English sculptor Anthony Caro through paired-up works that, even if coincidentally, are alike in shape and color.

Not to be missed at Yares is Swan Lake I (1961), which covered Artforum in 1969 and is in the splashy style of Alassio and Provincetown I. “There’s a lot of lore and legend about this one,” gallery owner Dennis Yares says. Its upper right corner was damaged in a boiler mishap but was later repaired by a museum conservator. You can still see the patch. “According to Helen, she witnessed a miracle,” Yares says.

“One of the great things about Frankenthaler is that there’s still so much work of hers that people haven’t seen,” says Smith. That she can still surprise us is not just because new paintings keep being unearthed, but because she was a painter of endless innovations. She was constantly assessing what she had made, keeping the parts she liked but trying on new ideas.

“That’s one of the things that differentiates her from a lot of other artists of her generation, who painted abstractly for decades,” adds Smith. “Her work can look different even in the same year, and certainly across the decades. The work evolves a lot.”

What was she evolving toward? Frankenthaler’s work is often praised for its in-betweenness, its haze of both freedom and restraint. But ambiguity is a moving target, so just when she figured something out, she’d move on.

Frankenthaler spoke of these reinventions with the art historian Barbara Rose in 1968. “It isn’t that I want to experiment with style,” she said. “I often want to experiment with the different ways I know myself.”

“Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance” is on view at Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street in New York City, through July 2.