Hug, 1979
Throughout her career, Louisa Chase sought an authentic practice of embodiment—a way of visually expressing her inner emotional life and the nature of perceptual experience. In 1979, she wrote in an artist’s statement: “painting for me is a constant search to hold a feeling tangible. . . .One moment is shattered into many moments, one place in a thousand places. Their relationship and scale determine the nature of experience, a psychological cubism in which all the directions are at once being that experience, the complexities of one feeling.” She remarked in 1982: “The forces closest to landscape are the closest to the internal forces that I am trying to understand. . . .The location is inside."
In the early 1980s, along with artists such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel and her friends Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, and Susan Rothenberg, Chase was a leading figure in both the New-Image and Neo-Expressionist movements. The former constituted a return to figurative form after decades when abstraction dominated the art world and the latter, a return to easel painting and expressive surfaces in reaction to the detachment and systemic modes of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Chase combined both approaches by introducing evocative and emotive schematized figurative imagery into works rendered with the subjective energies and process methodology of Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1980s, she emphasized mark-making to probe relationships of perception, being, and identity—in works both in the spirit of Surrealist automatism and structural geometric traditions. In addition to painting, Chase made drawings and prints. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1978–79 and 1982–83, she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1975 to 1978 and at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1980 to 1982. In 1985, she was a visiting artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, along with Mary Heilmann.
Chase actively exhibited her work until her death from cancer in 2016 at age sixty-five. Her 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 nationwide.