Pat Lipsky: That Which We Are

James Fuentes is proud to announce its representation of Pat Lipsky (b. 1941, New York City) as well as the artist’s solo exhibition in Los Angeles of new paintings made over the course of 2024; among the artist’s most prolific years as a painter. In parallel, at Frieze Los Angeles the gallery will highlight historic works from the 1970s, during which Lipsky first established the wave-form abstraction to which she returns in her newest work.

Lipsky’s paintings are rarely static, yet they leave a strong impression in the mind’s eye, like an after-image. Although surfaces vibrate with energy, they also evidence a clear undercurrent of deliberation and control. Color is not merely pigment but a force that gathers momentum across the canvas, rhyming in similar but varied arcs. One can imagine the horizontal movement of her arms, perhaps in unison, with which each band of color was applied using a saturated silk sponge; but in truth that moment remains hermetic, a code unknown. What’s foregrounded is the act of negotiation between the artist’s discernment and the materiality of paint itself, as if Lipsky were in conversation with each color, coaxing it to reveal more of itself through subtle and confident tonal shifts and in relation to its neighbors. Delineations between gesture and form are blurred, and instead each painting forms into a single pulse.

A lifelong New Yorker, Lipsky was steeped in modern art from childhood. Growing up in Manhattan Beach, as one story goes, it was in an art class at the age of ten that her instructor suggested the ocean need not always be painted in blue—a moment that would permanently alter her close perception of color and liberate her approach to representation. Continuing this education as a teenager by attending adult art classes at the Brooklyn Museum (led by Moses Soyer, one of the three Soyer brothers) as well as visits to the city’s major museums, Lipsky became familiar with the abstraction of European painters like Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Robert Delaunay, and observed developments in New York abstract expressionism and minimalism. By her twenties, she had connected with color field painting, particularly those painted directly onto raw canvas. On weekend trips to Manhattan during her time at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, an encounter with the paintings of Mark Rothko would leave her with the revelation that, in her words, “you could make a few colors the subject of a painting.”

Although some of her earliest works were figurative, Lipsky committed her focus entirely to abstraction after entering her graduate studies as an artist at Hunter College, where she found a mentor in Tony Smith. Her very first solo gallery exhibition, presented in 1970 at André Emmerich Gallery, was well received, including in The New York Times, which remarked upon her “bold pictorial intelligence.” Amid the many energetic, formal, and critical advancements of the 1960s, Lipsky’s earliest foundations in New York ultimately served to galvanize her against the tides of larger art-world trends as they came and went. For the artist, painting remains something far more eternal, and at the same time more purely connected to the present, for its capacity to register human gesture and feeling at once. Contextualized within the gallery’s larger program, Kikuo Saito (1939–2016), Lipsky’s peer, shared in her commitment to abstract painting and the formal possibilities of pure color.

While her earlier paintings were associated with the Lyrical Abstraction movement, differentiating from the minimalist rigidity of its predecessors, her work that came after demonstrates a remarkably geometric, even gridded or linear, approach that located a sense of movement through color and form in entirely new ways. Indeed, a close friend of Clement Greenberg, she shared his emphasis on aesthetic judgment and a theory of standards in art, as well as a belief in the formal essence of painting as a medium. It was only recently, when uncovering her early-1970s works for an exhibition at Eric Firestone gallery in New York that a spark would ignite Lipsky’s return to her earliest gestural approach to painting’s liquidity. In That Which We Are, she carries this project forward with a renewed sense of discovery that challenges both her and our expectations.