Abstract painter and Brickbottom Artists’ Building founding member Diane Novetsky has assembled a cohort of three inventive painters for a new exhibit of current abstraction at Brickbottom Gallery opening February 9 and running through February 28.

From the title, Paint/Cut/Fold/Stitch, one would expect an exploration of process and its relationship to the act of painting. This exhibit turns out to be much more—a catalogue of fresh approaches that include colorful mobiles that sway with life, art that deciphers the linear patterns produced via a sewing machine, and painting that merges dreamlike figurative vignettes with abstraction.

Three artists are veterans of the Boston scene and have shown widely. The newcomer is poet Denise Bergman who hits the ground running with “Danglers”, painted mobiles that rest on pedestals or dangle from the wall. Yildiz Grodowski creates semi-abstract paintings that play with figuration on canvas and panel. On-Kyeong Seong is an interdisciplinary artist who creates both two- and three-dimensional objects using cut fabric, machine stitching and paint. Curator Diane Novetsky is an abstract painter who uses bold, saturated colors and biomorphic forms evocative of the female body.

The artists display common formal concerns such as bold, unexpected color, biomorphic shapes and crisp geometry. Novetsky’s shapes bend, twist, and rotate on the picture plane, contradicting volume with flatness. This fractured space is echoed in Bergman’s dazzling arcs and zig-zags of color and Grodowski’s overlapping, sensuous stains and glazes. There is a dynamic synergy in the group ignited by the use of female forms or themes. Seong explores stitchery, a medium once considered to be a form of low art as it was usually produced by women. Her paintings are personal homages to needlework, restoring the art form to the serious consideration it deserves.

This exhibit exudes a freshness and determination to open up existing boundaries. All four artists work with paint on traditional substrates such as paper, cardboard, canvas, and clay. They are expressive colorists that intuitively use light, space and form with spirit and originality. But they depart from tradition by exploring unexpected paths that challenge our perceptions. In doing so, they are charting a new course in both painterly abstraction and figuration that is refreshing and timely.

Image: Denise Bergman, “Dangler #42, paper, acrylic, glue, 2022, 12” x 10” x 8”