The Eighties

Berry Campbell is pleased to present Louisa Chase: The Eighties. Louisa Chase (1951-2016) was an influential figure who occupied a distinctive position between the New Image Painting and Neo-Expressionist movements in New York’s flourishing art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. She worked alongside fellow women artists and close friends Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Marilyn Lenkowsky, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, and Susan Rothenberg, and her work was notably influenced by Philip Guston, who served as both a friend and a mentor since their initial meeting in 1975, during her final year at Yale. Recognized for her vigorous handling of paint and psychologically charged compositions, Chase developed an artistic language that paired gestural abstraction with a dynamic interplay of symbolic imagery, energetic marks, and expressive color. Her work moves between abstraction and figuration without fully resolving into either mode. Drawing on recurring images of heads, hands, and fragmented bodies, her paintings are direct and forceful. Louisa Chase’s work is represented in major New York museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as in public collections across the United States. Her work was featured in the American Pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale, curated by Marcia Tucker, former director of The New Museum of Contemporary Art. This exhibition marks Berry Campbell’s first presentation of Chase’s work since announcing its representation of the artist’s estate. It is accompanied by a 56-page catalogue featuring an essay by Michael Auping and a biography by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.

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