First Coral, 1970

Acrylic and plexiglass on aluminum

Helène Greenfield was brought up in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, Brooklyn. At eighteen years old, she married a rabbi, but he died in 1961, leaving her a widow with two young children at the age of thirty. Two years later, she adopted the surname Aylon, a Hebraized version of her first name. The artist is renowned as a pioneer of process-based abstraction and, throughout her career, was guided by her acute feminist consciousness. She began a body of process-driven abstract paintings in the late 1960s, grouped under the title Elusive Silver (1969–73). First Coral is part of this body of work. The Elusive Silver series were produced by spray-painting layers of acrylic onto a piece of plexiglass backed by an aluminum sheet. Thanks to this technique and despite its vast size, First Coral has an ethereal quality, evocative of clouds of smoke. The appearance of the surface changes as the viewer moves: areas of shadow transform into glimmers of light as the shine of the aluminum backing peeps through gaps in the paint. Speaking later of the series, Aylon said, “I was still in my religious mode looking for an invisible presence, a mystical female presence. Silver paintings were changeable but they were elusive—they only change with the position of the viewer.”