June Harwood’s works from the 1960s on view in “June Harwood Paintings” at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.

When June Harwood moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1950s, she found a fertile environment for her own artistic interests in the Hard-Edge movement then taking shape. She became friends with several artists, including Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, who were developing a new, reduced, classic style of painting, a response to the expressiveness of abstract expressionism then dominating in New York City. June Harwood Paintings features 34 paintings from throughout Harwood’s career, including her better-known Hard-Edge work from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a few surprises. The impressive exhibit at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, which fills three galleries, demonstrates that while Harwood may not be as well known as some of her peers (who can be seen in a sister exhibit at the museum—see our review here), she was able to turn Hard-Edge into a multivalent technique, adapting the technique to various styles, introducing new motifs and forms while always maintaining the hallmark precision of her early works.

Harwood’s work in the 1960s exemplifies the core principles of hard-edge painting, with its emphasis on precise, clean lines to create clarity, balance, and compositional rigor. Her works feature bold, interlocking geometric shapes with no visible brushstrokes. Colors are applied evenly across the canvas, creating a sense of cohesion and flatness. A grouping of works demonstrates that with a consistent, simple palette of mustard yellow, olive green, and gray she is able to create several unique and dynamic compositions, where her geometric forms shift and overlap in distinct ways, giving each painting a unique sense of depth and structure. The flat planes of color are precisely divided by clean lines, yet the arrangement of the shapes is sometimes angular and rigid, at other times more elongated and fluid. In some paintings, large, dominant blocks of color are interrupted by smaller, contrasting shapes, creating a sense of rhythm. In others, her use of layering and overlapping creates the illusion of depth, despite the flatness of the individual elements. Through subtle shifts in scale, proportion, and layering, Harwood shows there is endless room for exploration and innovation.

Works from June Harwood’s “Loop” series.

While her early work adhered strictly to the hard-edge style’s emphasis on geometric abstraction, Harwood later introduced curvilinear forms into her compositions. Even as she moved toward these more fluid forms, she maintained the same technical precision in her approach. In works such as the “Blue and Red” series from the 1970s, we see arcs of color that sweep across the canvas, introducing a sense of motion and dynamism. The bold red lines that curve across blocks of blue and gray offer a dramatic departure from the staid, angular compositions of her earlier period. Yet the hard edges remain, and the underlying rigor of her process ensures that these new, curvilinear forms are as tightly controlled as her previous works.

In several works from the 1980s, Harwood seems to source her designs from nature, extracting patterns found in, say, the reflections of light on water or the irregular growth of lichens on rock surfaces, for her compositions. These works take on a more spontaneous, almost accidental appearance, with fragmented shapes scattered across the canvas in a manner that mimics the randomness of nature. She remains rooted in abstraction, however, and has removed much so that the pleasing tension in the pieces comes from a familiarity that never quite resolves, leaving the viewer with a sense of anticipation, as if something recognizable is just out of reach. These pieces often feature bright, contrasting colors—vivid reds, blues, and oranges—that further emphasize the disconnect between the natural inspiration and the abstract execution. In this way, Harwood blends the worlds of nature and abstraction, creating a fascinating dialogue between spontaneity and control, randomness and precision.

In two of her late pieces, from the Migration series, Harwood seems to embrace the very painterly expressiveness that the hard-edge movement originally sought to reject. Thick, sweeping brushstrokes dominate these works, creating dynamic surfaces with heavy impasto and visible textures. The compositions feel looser, more gestural, with earth tones and muted colors replacing the bold, saturated hues of the pieces that preceded them. Despite this shift in style, Harwood’s late works retain a certain sense of balance and structure: there is a clear dialogue between her hard-edge origins and her newfound painterly freedom.

Several of these works have become part of NEHMA’s collection thanks to the June Harwood Charitable Trust, and we can expect to see them in future exhibitions and contexts. For now, however, June Harwood Paintings allows us to view the work of an artist across the span of a fruitful career and in wonderful dialogue with itself.

Works by June Harwood from the 1980s.

June Harwood Paintings, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, through Dec. 14.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.