The first full survey of the six-decade career of Pat Passlof, mainstay of New York's downtown abstract expressionist scene

Pat Passlof (1928-2011) was intimately engaged in the downtown New York painting scene in the 1950s and '60s, as a painter, a close friend and confidant of de Kooning and many others, and a cofounder of the March Gallery. She was a dedicated, ambitious woman in a male-dominated art world. But what is most impressive, at any time in her long working life, is her sensuous handling of oil paint, her idiosyncratic sense of color and her independence.

This monograph, the most comprehensive survey of her work published to date, brings her career of over 60 years into focus. As art historian Karen Wilkin demonstrates, Passlof's later works apply abstract expressionist spontaneity and painterly brushwork to a wide range of imagery, from systematic mark-making to emblematic figures, landscapes and horses.