Tracy Burtz
EXHIBITION DATES: March 3 – March 28, 2026
RECEPTION: Thursday, March 5, 5 - 8 pm
Wildflower, 2024, Oil on linen, 39 x 34
Five Flights Up, 2025, Oil on linen, 50 x 44 inches
The Painting Center is pleased to announce the solo exhibition“What She Knows” by artist Tracy Burtz in the Main Gallery and The Project Room. The exhibition will run from March 3- March 28, 2026 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 5 from 5 to 8 pm.
Tracy Burtz’s paintings draw the viewer into moments that are intimate and deeply felt. Nothing declares itself, yet everything feels held. Contained within color, pattern and subtlety, “What She Knows” is a meditation on the interior life of women: how it gathers, splits, mirrors itself, and shines through moments that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Tracy Burtz paints the lives of women as spaces to be entered rather than observed. The scenes invite the viewer inward. We are not positioned as observers at a distance, but as participants pulled into the room, asked to sit down, to linger just a little longer. Burtz’s compositions resist spectacle. Instead they offer intimacy and the slow accumulation of meaning in everyday moments.
The paintings remind us that when nothing appears to be happening, something profound is often happening just under the surface.
The focus is personal. Burtz draws from her own life, having grown up among four sisters, having lost her father at a young age. The world she constructs is one governed by women: emotionally, spatially, and symbolically. Within this landscape, women often appear alongside animals, particularly dogs whose bodies form a protective, gentle constellation around her. These animals are not decorative, they are essential, signifying unconditional love, safety, and steadfast presence.
Formally, Burtz’s paintings engage in a playful tension between depth and flatness. After more than forty-five years of painting, Burtz moves beyond her formal training, allowing space to become abstract and elastic. The canvas is treated as a surface to be activated rather than a window to be entered. Color and pattern carve out scenes more than line or strict perspective. The result is work that holds moments still while also allowing them to move fluidly through paint.
“What She Knows” is not a declaration of certainty. It is an offering of awareness. A reminder that knowledge can be intuitive, embodied, and quietly powerful. And the most intimate moments often carry the most color.
Tracy Burtz is a New York based artist. She received her BFA from Boston University School for the Arts and her MFA from Cuny Queens College. She also studied at The New York Studio School’s program in Paris.
She is represented by Edgewater Gallery Middlebury VT, Thomas Dean Fine Art Gallery Atlanta GA, East End Gallery Nantucket MA , Nantucket Looms Nantucket MA and The Painting Center NYC. She has had twenty solo exhibitions and been in forty six group shows.
