IMPULSE & IMPROV: maggio - giugno 2025

Impulse & Improv is a solo exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Petker-Mintz, curated by Paul D'Agostino on behalf of the artist at The Painting Center in New York City. The exhibition is on view from May 27th to June 21st, 2025.

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Impulse & Improv

May 27th, 2025 – June 21st, 2025
The Painting Center
547 West 27th St, Suite 500
New York, NY 10001
Hours: Tues, 10-4; Wed – Sat, 11 –6

The Painting Center is pleased to present Impulse & Improv, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Lisa Petker-Mintz. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, May 27th, and runs through June 21st, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 29th, from 5-8pm. In her new body of work, Petker-Mintz converges longstanding approaches to abstract compositions and forms with a heightened attention to saturated grounds, textured applications, playful color choices, and most of all, light, with a passion for nature and the mysteries of life guiding her hand and mind.

Link to Impulse & Improv on The Painting Center website

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Impulse & Improv: New paintings by Lisa Petker-Mintz

by Paul D’Agostino

Lisa Petker-Mintz is a seasoned, prolific painter whose vibrant, process-driven works emanate dynamism, passion, playfulness, and subtle notes of spiritual mystique. The artist’s most recent works, many of which were created alongside one another specifically for Impulse & Improv, are among her most confident and boldly expressive to date. In these, we see Petker-Mintz looking back into her own oeuvre to revisit enduring formal interests while carving out new compositional pathways for colorful saturations, layered mark-making, graphic dexterity, and variably organic intimations.

The exhibition’s title highlights the confluence of intentionality, intuition, impetuousness, and energetic flourish that characterizes Petker-Mintz’s creative mode and pictorial world. It encapsulates the artist’s approach and aesthetic alike, the most salient aspects of which, while evolving substantially from one body of work to the next, have maintained a striking sense of coherence and consistency over several decades of abstract production. Abiding sources of inspiration for Petker-Mintz in her relentless, often physically taxing pursuit of compositional novelty include pattern, repetition, nature, and color, with the artist maintaining a particularly keen sensibility for formal contours, tonal contrasts, and design-savvy manners of devising, accentuating, tempering, and resolving graphic complexities.

While earlier bodies of work often showed Petker-Mintz focusing on perhaps one or two primary compositional interests at a time, the artist’s new paintings evidence her revisiting and reinvigorating virtually all of them at once, while incorporating previously unexplored elements and a fresh lightness of touch. As such, we now find richly layered, harmonious intersections of the artist’s trademark saturations, rich palettes, starkly delineated geometries, embedded grids, lattice-like structures, botanical motifs, and references to all manner of classic patterns. Textures, lines, chromatic patches, and intervening swatches distinguish overlapping shapes. Energetic marks, meandering drips, controlled spills, and selective smears bustle and stir, jostling to be seen. Leaves, florals, and less identifiable organic motifs appear diffusely through colorful suffusions – rustling, whispering, preening.

Embracing self-prescribed modes of synthesis and transition, revisitation and reform, and resuscitation and revival, Petker-Mintz has pulled out all the pictorial stops for her new works in Impulse & Improv. The artist’s rigorously achieved, splendidly composed yields are rife with painterly zeal, experimental vitality, and soulful zest for creativity and life.