11:26 PM Louisa Chase: The Eighties presents paintings and works on paper from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, marking Chase's most comprehensive New York exhibition in over 25 years. Positioned at the intersection of New Image and Neo-Expressionism, Chase combined gestural abstraction with cartoon-like figuration — torsos, feet, hands, landscape forms — rendered in vibrant, emotionally charged color. A 1980 trip to Italy deepened her engagement with early Sienese and Florentine painters, while Philip Guston, a friend and mentor since 1975, shaped her psychologically charged compositional language. By the mid-1980s she had shifted toward pure gestural mark-making, using blades and trowels in place of the brush.
