Tess Bilhartz

Two women are on a road trip; these paintings are the snapshots of a summertime adventure gone wrong. The fragmented story pauses on moments along the highway. Glances are exchanged in mirrors, a weighted shadow transitions around a curve, a struck pose dissolves. Something happened, or will soon. The work vibrates with proximity to rupture.

Through her ongoing series of women on the road, Tess Bilhartz mines a wide terrain of American culture to recast narratives of mobility, alienation, and feminist agency. These paintings are in equal part invigorating and terrifying. Out past the borders, in a wasteland, characters come alive only on the edge of destruction.

Without beginning or end, this recursive trip is fueled by genre precedent (noir, grindhouse, horror) and palette—indigo, purple and red depict a world of nocturnal violence. The filmic compositions are tightly cropped to isolate and amplify the emotional registers of the women. Uncertainty takes over as paint twists the structured narrative foundation toward the fragmented and lost.

Tess Bilhartz grew up in Dallas, Texas. She has participated in recent group and solo exhibitions at Arts and Leisure Gallery, Orgy Park, Lesley Heller Workspace, Bannerette, and the Spring/Break Art Show. Residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017, the DNA Summer Residency program in Provincetown, MA in 2015, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio program in 2013-2014. She received her BA from Haverford College and her MFA in Painting from Boston University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.​