High Beams, 2011

Laura Newman   Emerging artists

Laura Newman is an American abstract artist who was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Newman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She obtained a Barchelor's Degree in fine arts from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1978 and also studied at the California Institute of the Arts Valencia and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. She has done several residencies, including at the American Academy of Rome, and has won several scholarships. She has worked in several faculties including Yale, Brown ... Newman paints in a very bright studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

In her studio we can find large format paintings done mainly with oil and acrylic paint and smaller works on paper done with ink, watercolors and other mediums. Her techniques include smearing, pouring and a combination of gesture and meticulous marks. Her geometric paintings combine a geometric delimitations of space, ephemeral fields of colors, dynamic lines and organic forms, creating atmospheric images evocative of representative landscapes, which open the door to something else.

Newman often finds inspiration by looking out the window of his studio. She is interested in the interaction between representation and abstraction. She uses a language of shapes, lines, colors and spatial relationships that could be read in a formal and abstract way, or that could be interpreted as fictional and illusory environments whose meaning is subjective.

In 2012, Sharon Butler, founder of the Two Coats of Paint project, wrote about her: "Laura Newman's color are always soft and fragile ... the colorful forms of ordinary appearance palpitate, squeak and hover, like the pigeons that she watches in front of her studio in Williamsburg ... [her paintings] are first of all a source of delight, they intentionally sow doubt in our expectations, letting us do the interpretation by ourselves from our own points of view, enigmatic forms, and narrative indices. "

Laura Newman has exhibited her work in several solo exhibitions in New York as well as in group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the United States and Canada. Her work has been the subject of numerous articles, including in Artforum, The New York Times. Her works are part of permanent collections of several institutions, including those at the Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM Corporation, Prudential Insurance Company and The University of Arizona.