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. 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." Describing her later evolution, David Brody writes in Artcritical, "Hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit seem to combine in Belcourt’s work to undermine stylistic stasis."

Belcourt has exhibited internationally, including shows at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Vienna Kunstlerhaus, The Drawing Center, Stewart Hall (Quebec), and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She has received awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, and her art belongs to the art collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Cultural Ministry of Quebec, and Fleming Museum of Art.

Belcourt splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and eastern Quebec, Canada.

Early life and career Belcourt was born in 1961 and raised in Montreal, Canada and spent summers in the Quebec town of Métis-sur-Mer, on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River.

Since 2000, Belcourt has worked for roughly four months of each year beginning in late May in Métis-sur-Mer, filling notebooks with plein-air gouache drawings of what she calls the landscape's clean, clear "heightened reality" and working on canvasses continued upon her return to Brooklyn. In the 2000s, Belcourt has had solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery (New York), Patricia Sweetow Gallery (San Francisco), and Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), among others.

Work Louise Belcourt, My Beautiful Family, oil on canvas, 72" x 80", 1995. Belcourt's paintings have been described as "battles between landscape and abstraction" ARTnews'''s Amanda Church writes, "Belcourt has carved a unique niche for herself in the canon of contemporary painting: the best kind, where antecedents are traceable but there's nothing that's quite the same." Works such as Sky Painting'' (2000) feature subtly modulated, horizontal bands suggesting stretches of land, sky and sea, their spacious calm disrupted with the intrusion of incongruous red tongue- or finger-like shapes. Belcourt's blob shapes give way to sculptural, monolithic slabs enhanced by cast light, which are set off by simplified pine tree and bare branch forms. 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.

The "Mound" paintings, begun in 2011, offer compositions that are less dense and feature sculptural shapes resembling buildings, appliances, boxes, or mountains. Belcourt incorporates a more varied palette—including black and greyed color shades—as well as curved, plant- and blimp-like forms that break up the space and are influenced (in shape and color) by her interest in gardening.

Awards and collections Belcourt has been awarded a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2015), and Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2017, 2000) and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (1985, 1984) grants. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Cultural Ministry of Quebec, Aspen Contemporary Art Collection, Council for the Estate of Francis Picabia, and Fleming Museum of Art, as well as many corporate and private collections in Europe, the United States and Canada.