Contributed by Alex Grimley / One of the main currents of abstract painting in the 1970s – much discussed then, not so much now – was the resurgence of painterliness that followed the 1960s trend of hard-edge, geometric abstraction. The subject of the 1971 Art News Annual, for instance, was “Painterly Painting,” while the following year, art historian John Elderfield published an expansive two-part article in Art International titled “Painterliness Redefined,” which traced the emergent tendency primarily through the work and influence of Jules Olitski. At the end of the decade, exhibitions like the Brockton Art Museum’s “Aspects of the 70’s: Painterly Abstraction” offered a retrospective view of this development. “Sherron Francis: Beyond the Stain,” currently at Lincoln Glenn, brings this strain of post-Minimalist abstraction into focus through a particularly assured body of work from the late 1970s and early 1980s.