Overlooked Artist Louisa Chase Returns To The Spotlight

A New York gallery is using a focused exhibition to restore Louisa Chase to the center of the conversation around contemporary painting.“Louisa Chase: The Eighties” at Berry Campbell is the largest and most comprehensive presentation devoted to the artist in 25 years, and it arrives just after the gallery announced representation of her estate.

The exhibition, on view through May 30, 2026, concentrates on works on paper from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. That span captures the period when Chase's practice was most visibly in motion: energetic, emotionally charged, and unwilling to separate abstraction from representation into neat categories. Instead, she treated them as overlapping registers, using both to build images that feel at once immediate and unsettled.

Louisa Chase (1946–2016) studied at Yale and was mentored by Philip Guston, whom she met in 1975 during the final year of her MFA program. She emerged in a formidable artistic milieu that included Marilyn Minter, Judy Pfaff, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. Her career accelerated quickly. In 1981, she had a solo exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery. That same year, she was included in the Whitney Biennial, and she returned to the biennial in 1983. In 1984, her work was shown in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The institutional record is equally strong. Chase's work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among other major collections. Yet, as Christine Berry noted, artists of Chase's generation have often been overshadowed in later accounts of the period, even when their influence was substantial.

That is part of what gives this exhibition its force. It does not simply revisit a productive decade; it argues for a more accurate reading of the artist's place in the evolution of contemporary painting. At a moment when museums and galleries are reexamining the canon, Chase's work offers a reminder that the history of the 1980s is still being written - and rewritten - through artists who were central to it the first time around.

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