April 14, 2026, New York, NY–Berry Campbell is pleased to present Louisa Chase: The Eighties, on view April 23 through May 30, 2026. Marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery since announcing representation of her estate, this exhibition features paintings and works on paper from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, a pivotal and emotionally expressive period of Chase’s practice. This exhibition will be Chase’s largest and most comprehensive in New York City in over 25 years.
Louisa Chase (1951-2016) was an influential figure in New York’s flourishing art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Her work evolved in close dialogue with her contemporaries, including Marilyn Minter, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. Chase was uniquely placed at the intersection of New Image and Neo-Expressionism, bridging New Image’s return to the figurative and Neo-Expressionism’s emotional intensity. The artist was notably influenced by Philip Guston, who became both a friend and a mentor to Chase after their initial meeting in 1975, during her final year at Yale, where she received her MFA.
Represented by Robert Miller Gallery, Chase gained broader recognition following her 1981 solo show with the gallery. Chase was included in the 1981 and 1983 Whitney Biennials and was represented at the 1984 Venice Biennale in the American Pavilion. During this period, her institutional presence grew significantly. In 1984, she had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, alongside appearances in major group exhibitions. These included American Painting: The Eighties at the Grey Art Gallery in New York (1979), New York Now at Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany (1983), International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (1984), New Narrative Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1984), and The Human Condition: Biennial III at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1984), among others.
Recognized for her vigorous handling of paint and her psychologically charged compositions, Chase developed a singular artistic language that combined gestural abstraction with a dynamic interplay of symbolic imagery, energetic marks, and expressive color, embracing the visceral immediacy of Neo-Expressionism. At the start of the 1980s, following a trip to Italy to study the early Sienese and Florentine painters, Chase created unsettling yet playful compositions, foregrounding cartoon-like decorative motifs in vibrant colors, ranging from bodily fragments such as torsos, feet, hands, and arms, to landscape forms. She employed pictorial metaphors to reveal the unpredictable forces of nature as well as her inner emotional life, highlighting universal feelings of joy and passion alongside anxiety and struggle. The artist’s ability to depict the wild elements of nature combined with emotive, schematic figuration is evident in Wave (1982), Yellow Storm (1983), and Untitled (1983). By the mid-1980s, Chase had shifted her practice, moving away from figuration and toward gestural mark-making. Removing the hand, the artist began using tools such as blades and trowels to create new textures and symbols in her compositions, as seen in Untitled, 1985.
Louisa Chase: The Eighties will open with a reception on April 23, 2026, 6-8 pm. A 56-page catalogue featuring an essay by Michael Auping and a biography by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., will also be published in conjunction with the show.
