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Artist: Diana Kurz

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Diana Kurz: Hidden in Plain Sight, an exhibition presenting a remarkable group of intimate-scale abstract paintings by Diana Kurz (b. 1936, Vienna) created during the early 1960s and recently rediscovered within the artist's expansive SoHo loft. The exhibition brings together a cache of previously unseen works that remained tucked away for decades among the contents of Kurz's expansive studio-home, where she has lived and worked since 1970. Most of the works range from approximately 9 to 15 inches in height and offer an intimate glimpse into one of the most overlooked periods of the artist's long and distinguished career.

The works came to light only recently when the artist's longtime studio assistant uncovered them while organizing storage areas within the loft. Hidden among stacks of materials accumulated over more than half a century, the paintings reveal a young artist deeply engaged with the language of postwar abstraction. Executed in oil, and in several instances incorporating collage elements, the works possess an immediacy and experimentation that illuminate Kurz's early development at a pivotal moment in New York art history.

Diana Kurz is best known for her incisive figurative paintings and portraits, as well as her longstanding advocacy for women artists. Yet before becoming associated with the figurative movement of the late twentieth century, Kurz was immersed in the world of Abstract Expressionism and the second generation of New York abstraction. Created during the early 1960s, these paintings demonstrate her engagement with color, structure, gesture, and surface at a time when artists throughout New York were redefining the possibilities of abstract painting.

Kurz's engagement with abstraction was grounded in rigorous training at a formative moment in New York's artistic culture. After graduating from Brandeis University in 1957, she earned a place in the highly selective MFA program at Columbia University. Before entering the graduate program, Columbia required Kurz to complete additional undergraduate studio coursework, a period during which she sought instruction from Hans Hofmann, whose influence on postwar American painting was profound. During one critique, Hofmann offered what Kurz would later regard as some of the most consequential technical advice of her career. Pointing with his index fingers to a pair of colors within one of her paintings and then identifying the same relationship in one of his own canvases, Hofmann demonstrated not stylistic affinity but a deeper principle: the way color creates space and space, in turn, shapes color. It was a vivid illustration of his celebrated "push-pull" theory. The paintings in this exhibition reveal Kurz's absorption of that lesson. Their surfaces possess a relentless push-pull quality, alternately drawing the viewer inward and subtly resisting entry, creating dynamic spatial tensions that far exceed their intimate scale. In these recently rediscovered works, color becomes both structure and sensation, activating the canvas with a remarkable sense of movement and depth.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)