New York

In 1941 Hedda Sterne fled her home of Bucharest for New York City, where she befriended avant-garde artists including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Despite her connection to this community of abstract painters, throughout her 60-year career Sterne remained focused on the world around her. As she once explained, “for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away. You have to know how to see.” In New York Sterne layered opaque and transparent planes to create an intricately composed window onto the density and vibrancy of the city