Pat Lipsky

“Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

—Paul Klee

James Fuentes is delighted to present Pat Lipsky: Color Next to Color. The exhibition presents a new series of paintings created between 2023 and 2025 alongside two of Lipsky’s formative color-wash compositions from 1971, as well as a rare self-portrait in the studio painted at age 17. As this exhibition reflects, while Lipsky is one of very few living women artists from the second generation of Color Field painters in New York, she remains remarkably active in the studio today. The exhibition coincides with the release of the artist’s memoir, Brightening Glance: Recollections of a New York Painter, published by the University of Iowa Press.

Color Next to Color articulates a kind of manifesto to Lipsky’s work, which reflects a lifelong fidelity to color in painting as a pure and exacting pursuit. Lipsky’s approach is rigorous and material-bound, grounded in color’s intrinsic properties and her direct negotiations with them. In her paintings, chromatic bands represent an active, dynamic force that unfolds in the optic field as Lipsky places colors in close proximity. Like syllabic repetition in text, the artist calibrates similar and slightly different colors in relation to each other, performing a kind of visual assonance that creates tension. Revealed rather than constructed, the resulting compositions assert new coherence.

A lifelong New Yorker, Lipsky is celebrated for her contributions to Color Field painting and lyrical abstraction, dating back to her first solo exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery, New York in 1970. She emerged in late-1960s New York at a moment when artists were increasingly occupied with the world of color at the same time as new intersections were emerging between art and science. In the context of the enthusiastic introduction of new media into art, painters like Lipsky who remained dedicated to the medium asserted compelling correspondences for using science as a basis for making paintings. In addition to her signature wave-form compositions that crystallized at the start of the 1970s, two of her so-called “stain paintings” from this same period Immirem-Immimo and Winter bring an expanded perspective to Lipsky’s early and lifelong preoccupation with color’s physical presence. Today, still, Lipsky’s references parlay a deep engagement with art history as much as the world at hand. Yet her true motivation remains color itself.

Pat Lipsky was born in 1941 in New York City, where she continues to live and work. She earned a BFA from Cornell University in 1963 and an MFA from Hunter College in 1968. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions since 1970 and is represented in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford. Color Next to Color follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Lipsky’s work earlier this year in Los Angeles.