lisa petker mintz: Impulse & improv

EXHIBITION DATES: may 27 - June 21, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, may 29, 5 - 8 pm

Closing RECEPTION: Saturday, June 21, 4 - 6 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Impulse & Improv, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Lisa Petker Mintz in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, May 27, and runs through June 21, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 29 from 5 to 8 pm. 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.  

Lisa Petker Mintz is an artist and curator from New York. She has studied art at Parsons School of Design (BFA), affiliated with The New School and SUNY at Buffalo (BA). She received her M.Ed. at Queens College. She attended workshops at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Yale.  Lisa Petker Mintz has also participated in an Artist Residency at M. David & Co. in Bushwick. To keep current on her artistic practice, she has attended classes at The Crit Club and The Crit Lab. Her curatorial projects include New Optics (2020), and Break of Day, Edge of Night (2022), both at The Painting Center in NYC. Exhibitions include the Islip Museum; Alfred Van Loen Gallery, Huntington, NY; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Denise Bibro, NYC; M. David & Co., Bushwick, NY; and The Painting Center, NYC.

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. 

– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D., is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator. 

For more information on the artist, visit: www.lisapetkermintz.com and @lisapetkermintz.