Judith Belzer

For exhibit 38 we are pleased to be showing new work of Bay Area painter Judith Belzer, exhibiting selections from her latest series, Paths of Desire, in which she continues to explore the collision of the natural and man-made world. Belzer uses oil paint at times like watercolor and at times like colored pencil, folding her surfaces in ribbons of thin wash and sharply meandering line. She adopts the aerial perspective of a crop duster, surveying the contested borders between back country, cultivated field, industry and the overlay of her own struggle for an organizing principle. Her motif is not so much the encroachment of civilization as one finds in the pervasive brand-scape, but its crimping effect as she renders worlds that fracture light like crumpled cans. She manages a balance between a maelstrom-like embrace and the hovering detachment of a naturalist reporting back on the condition of a discovered world.

Judith Belzer has shown extensively in New York, Boston, Chicago and California with institutional shows at the Sonoma County Museum and The Marin County Foundation; The Pelham Art Center, The Museum of Arts and Design and The Arnot Art Museum in New York. She is a recipient of a Yaddo Residency and a Norfolk Fellowship from Yale University. This is her third solo with the gallery.