In the 1960s, Frankenthaler shifted away from oil paint and embraced acrylic as her primary medium, facilitating a new emphasis on shape after a period devoted to gesture. This is evident in Mauve District, a painting that, she reflected, “relates to a theme which appears on-and-off, of pictures that often have one central vast shape, ‘district,’ or ‘territory.’” The geographical sense of those words is, perhaps, not accidental. “If I am forced to associate,” Frankenthaler acknowledged, “I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds and distances held on a flat surface.”
