Louisa Chase: Painting Psychic Risk

Contributed by Jason Andrew / At Berry Campbell Gallery, “Louisa Chase: The Eighties” is less a rediscovery than an emphatic reassertion of a leading painter who resisted easy categorization within the shifting narratives of the Neo-Expressionist and New Image movements in New York. Featured in this, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York City in over 25 years, are works that span the decade between mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, Chase, who died in 2016, emerges as a more complex and pivotal artist than she is usually considered. 

 

After training in printmaking at Syracuse University, Chase turned primarily to sculpture at the Yale School of Art. An encounter with Philip Guston in 1975, her final year, proved catalytic. From Guston, Chase got permission, as it were, to embrace symbolic figuration without sacrificing formal rigor, and to pursue painting grounded as much in emotional intensity as in structural invention. The result are canvases teeming with unstable imagery – shifting torsos, stretching limbs, curving waves, jutting cliffs, and fiery fields. Among her contemporaries, Chase’s work is not as nihilistic as David Salle, as muscular as Elizabeth Murray, as sexually edgy as Eric Fischl, as overtly gestural as Susan Rothenberg, or as grandiose as Julian Schnabel. It possesses what critic Kay Larsen in 1982 called a “brooding conviction” originating “straight from some inner source of strength.”

 

– Jason Andrew, Two Coats of Paint