Bortolami is pleased to announce Lesley Vance’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following a 2023 survey show at the Columbus Museum of Art. Her newest works range from large and expansive canvases to those executed in a smaller, more intimate format reminiscent of her early paintings. Increasingly sharpened, geometric forms contrast with some of the artist’s most expressive gestures, teasing the innumerable possibilities of painting itself as well as future directions for her to pursue.

Her larger works offer the artist the possibility to record the gestures of the full body, drawing attention to the difference between the arc of her arm versus that of the hand. Five small works, rendered here in the same palette of orange hues, green and white, demonstrate the artist’s ability to produce many dynamic outcomes from a deceptively simple set of limitations. They exist independently of one another, operating in their own discrete world and by their own logic. Hung together, however, each composition appears to have captured a different moment of the same scene over the course of an indeterminate span of time.

Vance works within a distinct set of conditions, beginning each painting with a limited palette of between three and five colors. An intuitive rather than premeditated process guides her work, as shapes with no discernible beginning or end progress through gradual, kinetic evolutions in the studio. Her compositions are anchored by stark, monochrome forms which bend and intersect with one another, their overlaps casting subtle shadows which complicate the demarcation between positive and negative space. Woven between them are long, expressive streaks of color; mixtures of adjacent hues which have been scraped into a textural if palimpsestic blur. Vance has compared the compositional resolution of her paintings to “hitting a pause button.” The work exists in a state of transformation where movement is suspended on the canvas, suggesting an unseen before and after.

Lesley Vance (b. 1977, Milwaukee) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin, Maine. Recent group exhibitions include 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Put It This Way, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York; To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting, Gagosian, London; Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser, Mu.Zee, Ostende, Belgium.

Her paintings are featured in the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, among others.