His painting style shifted subtly over his long career, becoming looser and more gestural in the 1950s and focusing almost entirely on the texture and brushwork
of black oil paint on large canvases in his works after 1979, works with a colour he called «Outrenoir», literally «beyond black».
The exhibition began with diagrammatic works from 1981, when in a small room in Kings Cross, London, Gormley made his first drawings
in black oil paint and charcoal, pinning the paper to the wall.
While the paint is still thoroughly wet, a brush loaded
with black oil paint is dragged horizontally in a straight line from the top left edge of the painting almost to its right edge.
Don't Quit Your Day Job: Jeff Koons 2017, Old Holland Ivory
Black oil paint on white gesso on wood panel 22 x 36 in / 56 x 91 cm
Each painting was created by dipping a video camera's lens
into black oil paint and dragging it across the surface of a mirror in successive bands, leaving only tiny bits of the reflective surface exposed.
Having seen Jackson Pollock's 1951 paintings of
thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Helen Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952.
Ofili then applied the heart shapes
in black oil paint and the black dots using rub - on transfers.
In his ongoing series, Exposed Paintings, layers
of black oil paint are gradually removed to reveal a deep violet, or green.
The Brooklyn show includes Whitten's Birmingham 1964, in which a newspaper photograph of a confrontation in Birmingham is partially revealed under layers of stocking mesh and
black oil paint, like a wound that can't be covered over.
Murray states, «Fifteen years ago I moved from figurative to abstract work on small canvases, limiting myself to
black oil paint.
Between heavily painted eyelashes and raven -
black oil paint, between trickles of turpentine and tears of despair.
In these, all the meaningful musical notations have been censored with vigorous horizontal stripes of
black oil paint.
His backgrounds are layers of black pigment, rabbit skin glue and slate dust, which he sanded down before building up the text in
black oil paint.
The Black Paintings were Hedrick's protest against the Vietnam War in which he took about 50 of his early canvases and painted them in heavy layers of
black oil paint.