Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

Marcia Hafif made this painting in Italy, where she lived for nearly eight years in the 1960s between college and graduate school. Her works from this period feature certain abstract forms that allude to landscapes, music, or the body. For example, she characterized a hill-like curve—which here appears twice and inverted—as “a compact shape, archetypal, referring to the cave, the house, the home, safety, endurance, intensity.” Hafif embraced an open-ended approach to abstraction that was grounded in observing the world, and the nature of painting itself.