Betsy Kaufman

Betsy Kaufman (born 1957) is a visual artist based in New York known for abstract paintings and works on paper, as well as needlepoint sculptures. Critics distinguish her work by its subversion of modernist systems (e.g. the grid structure, seriality) 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." Kaufman has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne (France), Queens Museum of Art, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Germany) and the Tang Museum, among other venues.

Education and early career Kaufman was born in San Francisco in 1957 and raised in the Bay Area. She attended Hampshire College before earning a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. By the late 1980s, she had gradually flattened and reduced this imagery to the landforms and, by 1990, to spare large abstractions of circles, rectangles, blobs, and blips. and Carnegie Museum of Art, and had solo shows at Wolff Gallery and Julian Pretto/Berland Hall in New York, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Abstract paintings and works on paper In 1997, Kaufman began exhibiting at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York. Hyde Collection Art Museum, Butler Institute of American Art, Tang Museum

Writers have compared Kaufman's later work to the minimalism of Agnes Martin, but distinguish it for its greater variety and embrace of unpredictability, both within and across individual works. Critics identify her overlaying of different yet exacting configurations and systems as a characteristic strategy that introduces slippage (or non-alignment) into the work and wreaks havoc with order and symmetry.

Recognition Kaufman's work belongs to the public collections of the Eli Broad Family Foundation, Sheldon Museum of Art, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the West Collection at SEI, among others, as well as to private and corporate collections. In 1995, she received a fellowship residency from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.