Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Betsy Kaufman. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

For over three decades, Betsy Kaufman has been working intuitively within the self-imposed constraints of hard-edge painting and minimalist vocabulary, but Kaufman’s work is anything but Minimalist. It is richly textured, highly personal and deeply felt.

Betsy Kaufman’s paintings reward long looking. What first appear to be a network of straight-forward geometric patterns reveal themselves to be anything but predictable. After closer inspection the eye picks up on subtle nuances like a latticework painted slightly askew or a merging of lines that never quite meet. Look closer and what first appeared to be a plane of even color morphs into planes of many slightly different shades.

In his introductory essay “Notes on Happiness” for Betsy Kaufman: Visual Notes, Barry Schwabsky describes the kind of idiosyncratic geometry at play in the artist’s work: “There is a geometry of sort, and geometry is always about measuring things, delimiting them—but this geometry thanks the measure of things in a paradoxical way: by taking the measure of itself in its insufficiency with respect to the totality of its own development in time and space. These forms, objects, geometry always seem to be in motion or off balance, not in the sense of the dynamism of, say, a Suprematist composition a la Malevich, but rather in the midst of an internal process or shifting that the viewer can experience as a pleasant kind of imbalance, perhaps even a sort of shimmying, as of a vehicle (painting is that vehicle) that is taking you somewhere. It's in motion, you're not in control, but you are part of it, and it feels good.”