Born in Elizabeth (United States), lives in Paris. Shirley Jaffe belongs to the generation of American painters such as Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, who lived in Paris in the 50s and have set up, in contact with European art, an active artistic environment. After a period near to the Abstract Expressionism, in the 60s she tends to a geometry that deals with colour and excludes gesture. Jaffe has established, as she herself comments, an "alphabet of geometrical forms of difficult identification". For more than thirty years, her work goes through denial of painting, to better seize the significant virtues of form.
