LIZBETH MITTY

Born in Queens, NY to a family of artists, inventors and actors, I grew up painting and writing. My work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in both the United States and abroad and is held in public and private collections including the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York State Museum, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Zimmerli Archive, The U.S. State Department, and Trierenberg Holding AG (Austria). My studio is located in Brooklyn, NY.

My body of work — described by New York Times critic Ken Johnson as a combination of “painterly verve and hellish beauty” — has long been concerned with examining and amplifying the intrinsic abstract beauty of deteriorating or overlooked corners of urban architecture and interiors. In 2015, one object, the chandelier, rose up from detritus to dominate and finally stand alone in my present body of work. Spectacular, illuminated and intricate, the chandelier is evocative of grandeur. For much of my career, scrap yards and other sites of urban devastation fascinated me as locations of organized chaos, formally beautiful, yet apocalyptic and terrifying. Similarly, the chandeliers speak of decadence, sadness, elegance, death and hope.

The chandeliers have led me back to architecture, but the subjects, carousels and gazebos, are in the round. This is an unintended preoccupation with the cyclical nature and mutability of things in times of excess.

Many of these paintings are shades of white on shades of black, taking on an ambience of ghostly languor. Others are colorful and on board, incorporating the by-products of studio life such as paint tubes and metal cans. The juxtapositions of conflicting images, such as man-made detritus and lushly lit interiors, serve as commentary on a post-9/11 sense of impermanence and the imperative to consider the finite nature of the earth's resources.