Pat Lipsky: Color Paintings

Oct 12 – Nov 11, 2006, opening Thursday, Oct 12th 6-8 pm
Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 W20 St, NY, 10011, 212 463 9666

The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to announce Pat Lipsky’s Color Paintings, nine canvases created since 2004. This will be her fifth exhibition with the gallery.

Ms. Lipsky who lives and works in New York City has exhibited both nationally and internationally for three decades. Her work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, the Brooklyn; she’s a recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, among others.

The new work continues her goal of expanding the vocabulary of color in abstraction. In this group, Lipsky focuses on colors that have not yet been labeled and codified — “no-name” colors which function like new words. Lipsky’s chromatics, always evocative, on occasion may bring to mind sea or sky or that sometimes nuanced demarcation between day and night.

There is also some reference to stained glass, a medium that she has studied in the early cathedrals of France and Germany. Her paint handling is meticulous, and what appear to be hard edges on closer inspection are seen as soft or blurred edges that give new meaning to the place where two colors meet.

The brochure accompanying the exhibition contains an essay by David Cohen: Color Names: The Name. He writes of the work:

“Such permutations notwithstanding, what is clear with Lipsky is that structure is ancillary to color. Like the sonnet, once you are aware that you have the visual equivalent of fourteen lines, strict and specific meter, and a set rhyme scheme, you move on to what counts for more, namely content, meaning, emotion. As with a sonnet, content is liberated by the form in which it is incarcerated.

“…Color is her subject the way language is the subject for Joyce. Which isn’t to say she is a formalist in the life-exclusionary sense any more than he is: there is everything of life in both artists; as experienced in color for the painter, or language for the writer”

Stephen Westfall, in Art in America, describes Lipsky’s work:

“Because the rectangles are made freehand, and the colors are arrived at through a patient buildup of successive coats of paint, a subtle gestural quality has been retained, animating the paintings far more than what we’ve come to expect from Minimalist or Neo-Geo Art.”

Color Paintings is exhibited concurrently with Lipsky’s Les Vitraux at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Showing these two groups of work at the same time will give the opportunity to see these two different approaches to painting in the settings of the Gallery and Cathedral.

The Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 61st floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 11-6.

For further information please contact Miles Manning at 212 463-9666.

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