Pat Lipsky began exhibiting her work in the 1960s at the Andre Emmerich Gallery soon after earning degrees at Cornell University and at Hunter College. Her gestural abstractions from that period were well received by the public and the critics. The past twenty years have seen Lipsky move into geometric abstraction in a big way. Recent exhibitions have been glowingly reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Partisan Review, and Art New England. Writing for the New York Sun, David Cohen described Lipsky as …not merely the dean of contemporary geometric abstraction, but its dominatrix. He went on to describe her work by saying: She offers color and shape relationships within structures of unrelenting rigidity, and it is not always clear whether the formal disciplines to which she subjects the eye are for her own satisfaction or for the viewer’s. A steely, seemingly dispassionate composure contains seething reserves of aesthetic emotion.

Lipsky’s paintings are large, at first simple, and then engagingly complex. Her compositions are made up of many layers of carefully studied, hand-applied pigment. They tantalize the eye, engage the head, and upon careful study do reveal the artist’s humanity, in a way that cannot help but reach the heart. Perhaps the best description of Lipsky’s recent canvasses that we have read was written by Stephan Westfall for Art in America: …her work has evolved into a geometric abstraction that features a shallow space composed of overlapping rectangles of various flat colors. Because the rectangles are made freehand, and the colors are arrived at through a patient buildup of successive coats of paint, a subtle gestural quality has been retained, animating the paintings far more than we’ve come to expect from Minimalist or Neo-Geo art. …one gets the sense of Lipsky’s painting being a one-woman operation once the canvas is primed, and its animate spirit the result of a human body determining the scale of the paintings and making them with a deliberateness and persistence that doesn’t rely on tape to find an edge.

George, 1999, oil on canvas, 41 7/8 x 65 1/8″

Pat Lipsky’s paintings need to be seen first hand to be fully appreciated. Plans are underway to mount a retrospective exhibition at ACME Fine Art of Lipsky’s geometric work in the coming calendar year. Please stay tuned for details. For complete biographical information visitwww.acmefineart.com.

The New York Times, 4 April 2003:

Ms. Lipsky’s compositions distantly resemble piano keyboards, enhancing the feeling of Bach-like musicality. The more you gaze at them, the more absorbing they become.   -Ken Johnson