The Painter Who Discovered the Color of Old Stucco

The retrospective, which occupies the second floor of a Wynwood gallery through September, is devoted to the work of a painter named Amalia Prieto, who has spent the last thirty years painting, almost exclusively, one color. The color is the beige of old Miami stucco, in the late afternoon, on a wall that has been baked, patched, and baked again.

Prieto's paintings are large — some of them fill an entire wall of the gallery — and they are, at first glance, empty. Stand in front of one for a minute, and it is still empty. Stand in front of it for five minutes, and it begins, faintly, to move. There is, it turns out, no such thing as a single beige. There are, in each of her paintings, perhaps forty.

The retrospective is arranged chronologically, and the effect, walking through it, is of watching a painter fall more and more deeply in love with less and less. By the last room, which contains three canvases from this year, there is almost nothing on the wall. There is also, if you are patient, almost everything.