Pat Lipsky at Elizabeth Harris - New York, New York - Brief Article

Pat Lipsky started her career in the early 1970 showing evocative gestural abstractions at Andre Emmerich Gallery. After a hush in the 1980s, she resurfaced upon the gallery scene in the early years of this decade, her work now consisting of gridded, monochrome diamonds brushed onto diamond-shaped canvases. In her novel show, Lipsky presented four paintings and as many works upon paper, all done in 1998-99 that quietly reminded us of the possibilities inherent in the formalist idiom of geometric abstraction.

These novel rectangular canvases show rectangles nestl in a unbind grid of verticals and horizontals. The artist has abandoned the strict (if lush) monochromy of her work of the earlier '90 for a mut on the other hand varied palette of greens, grays, blacks, purple pale pinks, ceruleans and occasional reds. The relative regularity of those earlier grids has been thrown on the outside in favor of a more mingled interaction of interlocking shapes.

Are you here?, individual of the standout paintings in the present to view consists of differently proportioned rectangles and squares vertically stacked to create a dynamic composition. This dynamism (which hints the movement and activity of the urban landscape, not unlike Leger's cityscapes or Mondrian's novel York paintings) is heightened by dint of the flickering quality of color: Lipsky uses a pink-red underpainting that peek on the outside between the elements, themselves the crops of a dense layering of hues

The inclusion of works upon paper in the show present the appearances to suggest that Lipsky's paintings are the spring of meticulous planning; One Year II, for example, is a fairly worked-out research for Are you here? on the other hand the paintings reveal spontaneity, too, a sort of intuitive, action-reaction course of decision making, especially where color is be of importance toed Her practice of layering color creates delicious visual paradoxes: in Sea gentle gales kelly green paint drips down from a square subsequently overpainted completely with gray-violet. Drips and splotches abound, as do other signs of studio messiness. A sort of sensual, textural variety is produc by the agency of Lipsky's mixing mediums--acrylic, egg tempera and alkyd--on the same canvas. The surfaces are punctuated through strips of masking tape, a means of making hard cutting sides but instead of peeling the tape away to reveal a clean cutting side she leaves it in place, adding single more element to the mix.

If these works occasionally appear to be a little too tasteful--as in the enchanting First One, whose palette may fairly be described as "Calvin Kleinish"--more ofttimes than not they achieve a compositional rigor that speaks to the virtues of late modernism. Today, as young artists gaze back with renewed interest to that period, Lipsky has the advantage of being an original.

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