Louisa Chase (1951 – 2016)

Untitled, 1976, painted sheet metal, signed and dated, 24 x 20 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, likely exhibited The Circle of Spheres, Wilcox Gallery, Parish Hall, Swarthmore College, March - April, 1978 (a solo exhibition of Chase's painted constructions)

$8000

Untitled is an early work by Louisa Chase. Created the year following completion of her MFA degree from Yale in 1975, Untitled was part of Chase’s exploration of painted and assembled forms created from a variety of materials. In a review of a group exhibition at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Bevier Gallery, critic Sally Walsh noted approvingly, “More Fun are Louisa Chase’s little worlds of stitched canvas, stuffings and mobiles. Happy colors, peppermint candy-cane stripes and polka dots decorate landscapes not of this world . . . In the world of the imagination, anything is possible.” Chase’s work from the mid-1970s fits squarely into the Pattern & Decoration Movement, which explored abstraction through revival alternate media traditionally gendered as female, such as textiles, and reappraisal of patterning and decoration, which had too often been relegated to “minor” forms of art. In 1978, Chase was honored with a solo exhibition at Swarthmore College’s Wilcox Gallery at the Parish Hall, called The Circus of Spheres, featuring her painted constructions, a show which likely included the present work.

By the early 1980s, Chase moved away from the aesthetic concerns of the Pattern and Decoration Movement and returned to painting on canvas. Her work often featured landscape-derived images, ghostly torsos and hands, an unusual array of iconographic imagery. By the mid-1980s, she shifted again to a sparer approach which depended on calligraphic markings. “The angry-child scratches have exploded into an allover web of messy Twombleyesque crosshatching; the individual lines gouge the built-up surfaces cruelly,” Holland Cotter wrote in Art in America, reviewing her show at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1986. Its appeal came from “scaled-down gestural poetry combined with Abstract Expressionist fervor.”

Chase was born in 1951 in Panama City, Panama, where her father was serving in the US Army. She was raised in Mount Gretna, Pa., and attended George School, a Quaker institution in Bucks County, before enrolling in Syracuse University where she earned a BFA degree in printmaking in 1973. After attending Yale’s summer program in her senior year at Syracuse, Chase enrolled in Yale’s graduate painting program, where she received her MFA degree. She then moved to New York, where Chase often exhibited and taught, including at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1975 to 1979 and at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from 1980 to 1982. In 1975, she received a graduate fellowship from the American Association of University Women, followed by grants in 1978-79 and 1982-83 from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1979-80 from the New York Council on the Arts Creative Artists Public Service. Chase exhibited widely, including at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, Galerie Inge Baker, Cologne, Germany, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Bard College. In 1984 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston organized a traveling exhibition, “New Currents: Louisa Chase.” The same year, two of her paintings, “Woods” and “Fire,” were included in the Venice Biennale. Chase’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Public Library, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, and Denver Art Museum.