Louise Belcourt

Louise Belcourt (born 1961) is a Canadian-American artist based in New York, known for elusive, largely abstract paintings that blend modernist formal play, a commitment to the physical world, and a visual language that shifts between landscape and the body, architecture and geometric form.

[1][2][3][4] New York Times critic Ken Johnson writes of her earlier work, "balancing adroitly between Color Field abstraction and Pop-style representation, Ms. Belcourt's paintings invite meditation on the perceptual, the conceptual and how our minds construct the world.

"[5][26][25] Her idiosyncratic visual language remains distinct from either a purely representational or abstract syntax, combining natural, architectural and geometric forms—often stacked, floating, occluded or cascading—that can evoke landscapes, prehistoric mounds, the built world or the body; as a result, her work is difficult to categorize.

[17][19][33][26] In her review of Belcourt's first solo show, New York Times critic Roberta Smith notes subtle indications of an interest in the body and landscape, pronouncing the effect of works such as My Beautiful Family (1995) as "peculiarly vulnerable" like "a painting with scraped knees.

"[17] In his review of Belcourt's next show (Peter Blum, 1997), ARTnews critic Gregory Volk describes her paintings (e.g., General Upsets, 1996; They'll Never Forgive You for Being Pretty, 1996-7) as "palpably human" abstractions that were at once "searing and gorgeous," intensely personal and restrained, ethereal and brutal.

[33][19][30] Dominique Nahas notes the work's careful mix of deliberateness and happenstance, understated optical effects and shifting figure-ground relationships, which creates a "life force" fluctuating between tenderness and vehemence, theatricality and non-narrative form.

[36][37][13][34] In Island (2000) and Woo (2001), small tufts of grass transform abstract color-field paintings into seascapes—in these cases unsettled by what The New Yorker describes as "a Gustonish serpent slithering into Eden" in the former, and a red eel- or finger-like shape popping through the surface in the latter.

[5][16][20] Critics note a greater degree of spatial effects and figure-ground contradictions in Belcourt's later work, achieved through subtle shifts in tone, color and light and more expansive forms and compositions that conflate landscape, cityscape and geometry, and organic and artificial.

[2][1][26] In the "HedgeLand Paintings" (2009–10),[43] Belcourt shifts in a geometric direction, replacing formerly sweeping vistas with dense, fractured configurations of stacked brick- or box-like, modular forms that press against the picture plane and defy spatial logic.