NYAB Event - Louise Belcourt "Paintings"

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At Jeff Bailey Gallery
Media: Painting

In this new body of work, Belcourt continues to challenge the boundaries of landscape painting, exploring the tension between representation and abstraction. Her characteristic hedge-like forms resemble blocks or cubes, fracturing and defining space. Multiple horizon lines reveal partial views of mountains, sky and water. The picture plane and its component parts are fluid, and, like nature itself, constantly changing.

Belcourt’s paintings are filled with light. It is crisp and clear and inspired by the rural Canadian landscape that she visits each year. The large hedges that inhabit these open spaces are dense and dark green. For over ten years, Belcourt has created numerous versions of these hedges: long and sinewy, bulbous and bushy, wide and imposing.

Belcourt’s process is revealed through varying degrees of abstraction. Hedgeland Painting #13 features cube-like forms with simplified landscape views. Mountainous shapes curve and undulate. A red block of color jumps from the picture plane, and the block is mirrored in a silhouette of black line. Perspectives shift, and vistas appear both near and far. Layers of oil paint give a sensual and organic quality to the forms, suggesting a mysterious life source.

HedgeLand Painting #11 is similar in its puzzle-like assortment of mounded and cubed shapes. Opaque whites and warm creams jostle with shifting greens, yellows and blues. The geometry of planes and grids is broken by multiple waves. Space and form mirror each other, and then change. Cross-sections and split images are presented simultaneously, top to bottom, side-to-side. Belcourt’s unique combinations of color, light and space allow for another way of seeing, or sensing, what is around us.

This is Louise Belcourt’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first in New York in almost four years. She lives and works in New York and Canada.

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