For more than twenty-five years, Betsy Kaufman has created highly personal works by subverting the minimalist orthodoxy of systems and seriality within the lexicon of hard-edged geometric painting. A self-described “abstract expressionist,” she paints intuitively, with a lifelong passion for reading fiction that underlies a process she describes as “telling stories with surprises.” Emotional yet formal, spontaneous yet controlled, she uses color that is as idiosyncratic as it is sophisticated.
The exhibition, the artist's seventh one-person show at this gallery, will include paintings created during the past two years. These newest works display a radically disciplined vocabulary that paradoxically revels in sensually heightened color application and surface refinement. Kaufman began the series immediately following her most recent exhibition at this gallery, an installation of thirty-one small, wildly varying geometric paintings that were shown together with polychrome sculptures from the 1960s by Robert Watts, and colorful animated videos by Lawrence Weiner (for whom she worked as a studio assistant in the 1990s.)
A Story of Red (2013), the centerpiece of the show, features thirty-nine individual paintings executed on eighteen-inch square wood panels of varying depths. Installed on a twenty-five foot long gray rectangle painted directly on to the gallery’s western wall, they translate the subtle spatial transitions of her previous works into three dimensions.
Beginning with a single painting, Kaufman built a system of expanding and contracting quadrangular shapes, created in a range of luscious lipstick shades, that push and pull within the confines of satiny white backgrounds. As variations were added to the group, she hung and rehung each element until finally achieving a cohesive yet unbalanced, highly charged “conversation.”
In the relational structure of its minimal, repetitive, yet sensual elements, Kaufman’s piece may recall Walter Benjamin’s observations on the loss of the art of storytelling brought about by the rise of the novel. According to Benjamin, stories are more completely integrated in a listener's memory because they involve a shared experience that is assimilated through repetition.
The exhibition also includes triptychs, multi-part pieces and individual paintings on square, and almost square rectangular panels, none measuring more than nineteen inches on the longest side.
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 where she continues to live and work. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US and Europe.
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.