Louisa Chase Landscape Paintings

Title: Grotto Dated: 1981 Size: 72 X 96 inches Technique: Oil paint on canvas Provenance: Robert Miller Gallery New York This is a large magnificent, Neo figurative, expressionist painting. A bright, vibrant piece in yellow and purple, green, gray and black colors. Louisa Lizbeth Chase (1951 – 2016) was an American neo-expressionist painter and printmaker. Louisa Chase was born in 1951 in Panama City, Panama. She grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 1973 and her MFA in fine art from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975. In the year of her graduation she had her first New York exhibition, at the alternative gallery Artists Space. She taught painting at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1975–1979, and at the School of Visual Arts from 1980-1982. She was a National Endowment for the Arts grantee. She exhibited at the 1984 Venice Biennale. Her solo exhibitions include: Brooke Alexander Gallery (1989) The Texas Gallery in Houston (1987); Gallery Inge Baker in Cologne, Germany (1983) and others. She had solo exhibitions at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin’s Madison Art Center, and Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum. Her work was featured in group exhibitions at the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art, SFMoMA, LACMA and the Brooklyn Museum. Her work is in the collections of: the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.[ Chase lived in Sag Harbor, New York. She died on May 8, 2016 in East Hampton, New York, at the age of 65. Louisa Chase is known for her use of schematically drawn body parts (i.e. hands, feet, torsos) and elements of landscape, separately or combined. She used a bright color palette and geometric forms. Chase paid special attention to the brushstrokes and markings in wood in her pieces. Chase’s work shows influence from New Image Painting and Neo-Expressionism. She was an accomplished printmaker and worked in woodcut, lithograph, etching, monoprint woodblock print, collage and chine colle along with watercolor and oil painting techniques. Chase’s paintings often have a sense of juxtaposition between disturbing imagery and lightness or even humor of style. “When peopled, her fragments of place are inhabited by partial figures: torsos, hands, feet. They are hovering or falling or drowning or being assumed into the sky.” This imagery is contrasted by the cartoonish style with which Chase would symbolize these body parts, the many energetic brushstrokes and the bold colors she would use. Swimmer, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of Chase's use of cartoonish human bodies and body parts rendered in geometric shapes. Exhibitions 1975 Artists Space, New York 1979 Chase's work "Tears, Ocean II" part of Painting: The Eighties at NYU 1985 New Currents: Louisa Chase. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 1996 Madison Art Center 2008 Goya Contemporary & Goya–Girl Press in Baltimore, Maryland Works and publications Chase, Louisa (1982). Louisa Chase. New York, N.Y.: Robert Miller Gallery. Chase, Louisa; Salcman, Michael (2003). Louisa Chase : New Paintings. Baltimore, Md.: Contemporary Museum. Amenoff, Gregory; Tallman, Susan (1989). Contemporary Woodblock Prints: Gregory Amenoff, Richard Bosman, Louisa Chase ... Jersey City, N.J.: Jersey City Museum.She was included in the seminal show "American Painting: The Eighties" organized by the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University. Artists in the exhibition Included Dennis Ashbaugh, Frances Barth, Louisa Chase, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Sam Gilliam, Nancy Graves, Richard Hennessy, Elizabeth Murray, George Noel...