Louisa Chase On Sale

Louisa Chase was born in Panama City, Panama. Seven years later, her family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She studied painting and sculpture at Syracuse University and at the Yale University School of Art. In 1975, she moved to New York and had her first solo show at Artists Space. 

Chase was among the wave of Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s who rejected the detached, pared-down approach of Minimalism and Conceptualism in favor of a dynamic technique and the use of symbolic imagery in her paintings and prints. She has had numerous solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and has participated in group exhibitions held in the United States and abroad, notably at the Daimaru Exhibition Hall in Osaka, Japan, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1984. 

In 1984, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston organized a traveling exhibition of Chase’s work, and in 1997 the Madison Art Center held a retrospective exhibition of her prints. 

Chase is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978–79 and 1982–83. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. 

Chase’s work can be found in major public collections across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City the Madison Art Center, Wisconsin; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the New York Public Library; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Biography provided by Diane Villani Editions)

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.