Louisa Chase

As the tight grips of Minimalism and Conceptual art finally began to loosen up in the mid-1970s, a new generation of painters was allowed to emerge in a mini-movement that is often referred to as "New Image Painting." Working within this new generation was a young Louisa Chase, whose turbulent, frantic, neo-expressionist canvases were highly celebrated as a rejection of the detached, pared-down approaches of the Minimalist and Conceptual Art movements before them. In fragmenting landscapes and body parts, Chase's subject matter has unsettling undertones, as if they are "hovering or falling or drowning or being assumed into the sky." Combined with a cartoonish immediacy and uninhibited color palette, Chase delivers curious juxtapositions between form and subject. 

Born in Panama City, Panama in 1951, Chase's family eventually moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After studying painting and sculpture at Syracuse University and Yale, the young artist moved to New York in 1975 with her first solo show at Artists Space. She has had numerous solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, 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, and the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1984. That same year, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston organized a traveling exhibition of her 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. Her work can be found in almost every major New York City public arts collection, as well as in major public collections across the country. 

Courtesy of Diane Villani Editions