Harper’s is pleased to announce Sapphire Pass, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Lizbeth Mitty, her third solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition opens Thursday, April 10, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Lizbeth Mitty’s paintings are truly sensational in the sense that they are unwaveringly, sensorially indulgent. Their visual bedazzlements are of such range and richness as to elicit virtually somatic responses, while their broadly auratic treatments and atmospheric settings burst with narrative implications that traverse, breach, and transcend the artist’s profoundly evocative picture planes at hand. This is all especially palpable in Mitty’s larger-scaled works, and in those that host the most robust arrays of her splendidly imaginative representations of the natural world.
In this light, viewers should expect to delight in a somatosensory feast while engaging with Mitty’s new paintings in Sapphire Pass. This carefully selected, chromatically resplendent suite of works registers with the artist’s trademark freshness and verve while evidencing, nonetheless, her ongoing pursuit of image creation through well-honed processes that entail loosely envisioned, generally serialized planning, on the one hand, and physically taxing, materially saturated, gesturally enlivened aspects of chance, on the other. It’s a procedure in which the ultimate image is a revelation at the conclusion of a quest rather than the foreseeable outcome of a matter of illustration or execution, a process Mitty describes as “taming the savage nature of paint” until the materials eventually “fall into images of resolve.”
At work in the studio, Mitty moves her surfaces around regularly from floors to walls, subjecting large swaths of raw canvas to layered pours and diluted diffusions of acrylic paint to create colorfully saturated, richly variegated underpaintings suggestive of subsequent compositional directions and incipient formal coalescences. These preparatory treatments furnish ample cues for the artist to ideate, situate, and increasingly complicate further strategies for imagery through freeform drawing techniques with brushes and squirt bottles, a dance that leaves vivacious traces of itself in loosely stratified, broadly gestural renderings punctuated by dazzling pictorial particulars. Catalytic and ultimately representational, Mitty’s variably energized process persists as an active presence in her completed works—evinced by the imagery as opposed to entrapped in it. Drips, dapples, and bleeds leave details sparkling, motile, and spatially malleable, while colorful suffusions and coincidental permeations sustain a stirring sense of ulterior restiveness, at times even turbulence.
Mitty’s painterly modes are narratively ripe in their own right, so it’s fitting that their yields—the various subjects and settings she uncovers through them—open themselves up to narrative interpretation as well, a reflection of the artist’s lifelong passions for literature and cinema. Indeed, the paintings in Sapphire Pass readily manifest as literary and cinematic alike—from their enigmatic, storybook-village-type trappings to their isometrically engulfing, establishing-shot-like points-of-view. Mitty’s fictional locus operandi here, Sapphire Pass, is one place or it is many places, a narratological place-type full of magic and swirling atmospherics. As viewers, we find ourselves tucked into leafy hillside perches or taking in views from overpasses, looking out all at once at valleys below and beyond, at rivers and lakes, at mountainsides and mountain ranges, at distant horizons and patches of skies, and at towns and villages of ambiguous remoteness that seem to exist as isolated worlds unto themselves—unreal yet convincing, and outside of any construct of time.
Meanwhile, the sensory joys of Mitty’s works inhabit an ongoing present moment. The scent of rainstorms, the pungent aroma of damp foliage, and the subtle skin-feel of shifting airs are palpable in Petrichor and Deep Blues, works encompassing an overall cool chromatic spectrum while exuding notes of light humidity. The markedly warmer Blue Hill is illuminated by clearer skies, bountiful sunlight, and vibrant hues. This sensory sensationalism then reaches its apex in the keystone painting that lends the exhibition its title, Sapphire Pass. In this work, a royal blue river cuts through an endless valley backdropped by a golden-hour sky. Brilliantly arrayed dwellings and curious outposts line the riverbanks and climb the hills as dangling branches, leafy shoots, and brushy canopies flecked with neon hues frame our breathtaking viewpoint of a robustly envisioned landscape—a romantically charged setting that’s narratively boundless, experientially charmed, and pictorially majestic.
Mitty’s paintings in Sapphire Pass feature the eponymous setting as an active protagonist. The exhibition is thus a character study of place. Here, viewers can enter, participate in, and expand on Mitty’s multisensory imaginarium, imagining themselves in the midst of this dreamy world where echoes of strident caws and sonorous birdsong hover in the air.
—Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, curator, educator, and translator.
Lizbeth Mitty (b. 1952, Queens, NY) received a BS and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973 and 1975, respectively. Mitty is a recipient of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Most recently, her work has been presented at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024); Adhesivo Contemporary, Mexico City (2024); Harper’s, Los Angeles and New York (2022); Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta (2022); Hollis Taggart, Southport, CT (2022); UNTITLED Miami Beach, Miami (2021); Marquee Projects, Bellport, NY (2021); Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee (2020); M David & Co., Brooklyn (2019); Caldwell College, Montclair, NJ (2018); and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2018). Over the course of her career, Mitty has been featured in Art in America, New York Times, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. Her work has been acquired by numerous collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York State Museum, Northwestern Mutual Life, Orlando Museum of Art, and Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Mitty currently lives and works in Brooklyn.