Betsy Kaufman

[6][7][8] Writer Ingrid Schaffner observed that Kaufman's paintings are "inherently based on disruption … She has made the accidents, oppositions, contradictions, and mercurialness, which most organizing impulses work hard to minimize, into the rationale that guides the unpredictable and forceful narrative of her abstractions.

[17][5] Recognizing some of the contradictory qualities that became more pronounced in her later work, Artforum critic Ronnie Cohen wrote that the clarity of these images spoke "directly of order and structure" while simultaneously offering "something wonderfully whimsical" in their compositions.

[23][9][4] Kaufman employs simple means—geometric shapes, skewed and parallel lines, semi-transparent, solid or brushy bands and grounds—with finely calibrated differences in brightness and hue to achieve states of density, dissolution, and movement.

[5] Describing the work as "the softest hard-edge paintings you could possibly imagine" in one essay, he has noted the varied effects Kaufman attains with contiguous color blocks, ranging from stained-glass transparency to staccato movement (Rose Garden, 1993) to spatial illusionism suggesting blown-up, digitized photography (Sugar Street, 1994).

[16][5] In reviews of shows at Leslie Tonkonow, critic Jed Perl wrote that Kaufman brought "new energy to old games" through a mischievous use of regular patterns to produce irregular effects, while The New York Times's Ken Johnson described paintings such as Wavers and Blue Text (2000) as "unpredictably various" and "at once mathematical and poetic.

[6][4] In a 2011 three-person show (with Robert Watts and Lawrence Weiner), she presented a series of small, minimal yet expressive, roughly square images of overlapping polygons, hazy parallelograms and portal-like shapes that were likened to forms in the act of solidifying or turning into gas.

[6] John Yau wrote that looking at the four large acrylic paintings and 20 small works on paper in Kaufman's 2016 show was "an act of meditation, of sensitivity to difference and placement" that evoked the "computer screens and the floating ambience of the digital world—a feeling of being both rooted and uprooted.