NEW BRITAIN, CONN.- The New Britain Museum of American Art presents special exhibition Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart from August 22, 2025, through April 26, 2026.

First-generation Abstract Expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) excelled in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. In 1979, he embarked on an extraordinary foray into printmaking, afforded by the opportunity to work with traditional etching techniques and tools at the Rockland Foundation, near his home and studio in Suffern, New York. By this time, his dense and complex abstract compositions of the 1940s and 1950s had transitioned to all-over fields composed of small gestures and marks, often organized around a central geometric or organic shape.

Altered States is a consideration of etchings created by Richard Pousette-Dart during this period, offering a fascinating vantage into the artist’s innovative work in the medium. Favoring spontaneity over the rote and repeatable, he enriched numerous examples with secondary, hand-applied pigments. Although hand-coloring dates to the origins of printmaking itself, unlike the majority of his predecessors, Pousette-Dart was not interested simply in filling in outlines or heightening with decorative hues. Rather, his daubs, lines, drips, and accretions became integral to these works of art, transforming them into something unique and new. Altered States features etchings in both original and reworked examples, revealing the artist’s multiple points of departure from a single image.

This exhibition is organized by the Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation in coordination with the New Britain Museum of American Art.