Ernestine Betsberg, A Retrospective

February 23 - April 20, 2024

“Ernestine Betsberg's career as a painter began at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1934. It would take her to Southern France on a scholarship, briefly back to Chicago, then New York, Rome, Florida and Saint Louis. She developed a remarkable and successful style embedded in her own instincts. Betsberg’s oeuvre centers around her interaction with friends, places and events, and reveals her approach to abstraction. Her paintings are radiantly infused with an aura of a particular encounter almost like a theatrical occurrence. Whether in paintings with her sister, husband, fruit stands, dance studios or windows, it is her distillation of the situation that informs the paintings. There is a steady assuredness and stubbornness about her constancy of subject and ability to confront major painting issues, such as space and color. Betsberg’s solo exhibitions in New York at Grand Central Moderns Gallery predate many other contemporary women painters. In an era when most exhibited painting reflected masculine perspectives, Betsberg’s quiet revelations sing about connectedness and meaning.

Her contribution to painting is that she sought the extraordinary in the ordinary. Not entirely unlike aspects of surrealism, there is a familiar but subconscious dream-like interpretation of a specific location such as a storefront window or interior. She transforms the familiar and plays with the mystical. Betsberg reports that there is something special in all events. Her seemingly simple subjects touch a profound universal experience and pull her history into ours. What may be noteworthy is not a particular vegetable or chair but its pattern or place in the world. Compositional order becomes universal order. These paintings are not akin to snapshots; they are dredged from the after-burn of an experience. This exhibition and book are an acknowledgement of Betsberg’s life and work.”

- Stephen Shank