Leslie Tonkonow presents BETSY KAUFMAN : Paintings and Drawings
7 Jan 2005 to 12 Feb 2005

n her newest paintings, rendered in acrylic on large canvases, Betsy Kaufman continues to expand her visual language. To the grids, stripes, lines, and hard edges of minimalism, she brings emotion, unpredictability and formal contradictions. While adhering to it’s structure and intellect, she refuses to conform to the logical systems and serial repetitions of traditional geometric abstraction.

A passionate fiction reader, Kaufman compares her intuitive working process to story-telling. Her paintings are never predetermined and she does not make studies.


Impetuous, 2003–2004, is an overlay of exuberant brush strokes, undulating stripes and a series of open rectangles that appear to move within and across the canvas. Still No Hero Here, 2003 extends an earlier dialogue inspired in part by the abstract expressionist painter Clifford Still, in which transparent rectangles appear to float across fluid, fissured waves.


For Betsy Kaufman, drawing continues to be a primary activity, independent of painting. Works made of densely rendered parallel lines drawn with Prismacolor pencils will be exhibited. An installation of framed drawings on colored paper with similar pieces rendered directly on the walls underscores the physicality and conceptual grounding of all of Kaufman’s work and will be a highlight of the exhibition.

Betsy Kaufman was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After earning a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, she arrived in New York in 1980. Her exhibition career began in 1984 at Wolff Gallery in the East Village. Since then she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US and Europe.


IMAGES :


top :
Falling-Flowing-Floating, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 150 inches overall (3 panels: 90 x 50 inches each)

left :
Still Afloat, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 50 inches


bottom right :
Framed, 2004
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 50 inches