Background

Pat Lipsky was born on September 21, 1941, in New York City, New York, United States. She is a daughter of Bernard G. Sutton, an engineer, and Bernice D. Brown, a painter.

Lipsky was raised in New York City.

Education

Pat Lipsky completed her secondary education at the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York.

Then, she had studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School until 1961. Two years later, Lipsky received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Cornell University.

Then, she took some art lessons at the Art Student's League in New York City and at the Hunter College's Graduate School of Painting where she was taught by the painter and sculptor Tony Smith. Lipsky obtained her Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1968.

Career

The start of Pat Lipsky’s career can be counted from 1968 when she joined the teacher’s staff of the Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. She had served here as an instructor for one year.

The canvases of this period which represented Lyrical Abstraction were demonstrated at the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York City at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1970. The event provided the artist with the first acclaim.

The same year and the subsequent one, Lipsky took part at the famous Lyrical Abstraction exhibition which was shown firstly at the Phoenix Art Museum and travelled around the United States with a finishing point at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

By the early 1980s, Pat Lipsky’s style changed. The colours which became bolder were incorporated in the precise geometric forms that however didn’t lose their expression.

The artist combined her active participation at the exhibitions with teaching activity. So, she taught art at such institutions as the Hunter College (1972-73), the San Francisco Art Institute (1974), the Purchase College (1980-81), the Parsons School of Design (1982-83) and the University of Hartford Art School (1983-2002).

The changes accompanied Lipsky’s art during her entire career, and by the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the palette she used in her canvases was finally filled with sharply determined colours. The paintings of this time, like ‘The Black Paintings’ series, were demonstrated in Miami in 1994 and in New York City in 1997. Her international break-out came with the exhibitions organized in France.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Pat Lipsky started to group the colours into a bold central image.

In 2010, Lipsky became an art instructor at the Art Students League in New York City.

Since her debut in 1970, the artist has taken part in a great number of solo and group exhibitions, including the shows in such well-known galleries as Alan Stone, Andre Zarre, Lori Bookstein, and DC Moore in New York City, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Norton Museum of Art.

One of the recent personal exhibitions of Pat Lipsky, a huge retrospective called ‘Pat Lipsky: Stain Paintings 1968-75’ was organized in 2017 at the Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City.

Nowadays, the artist lives and works in New York City.

Achievements

• Pat Lipsky is an accomplished artist whose colourful abstract paintings are widely recognized.
  
  During her career, the artist received a great number of prestigious grants including the New York State Council on the Arts Grant (twice), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship (twice), the Vincent B. Coffin Grant (twice), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (three times), the Winsor & Newton Paint Company sponsorship, the Jerome Foundation grant, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (twice).
  
  Besides, Lipsky is a recipient of such awards as the Purchase Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize and the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
  
  Pat Lipsky was featured in the notable biographical dictionaries including Who’s Who in American Art, Who’s Who in America, the Dictionary of International Biography and Two Thousand Notable American Women.
  
  Lipsky’s pieces of art are represented in numerous permanent collections of many famous museums and art galleries, like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, the Permanent Collection of the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Red River Valley #1

  • Bumble Bee

  • As She was

  • Magus

  • Homage to David Smith

  • George

  • Playing Field

  • Laughing Eye

  • Nuances for C.G

  • Spiked Red

  • French Painting

  • Thin Fingers

  • Sun Ray

  • Luminaria

  • Glowing

  • Blue, Grey not Touching

  • Truth

  • Sandwich

  • Equitone

  • Tulips

  • Red, White and Blue

  • Helios

  • For Leslie

  • White Space

  • Episcopalian Pandemonium

  • In Memoriam C.G.

  • Proust's Sea

  • Truth II

  • Dark Love

  • Morning Fever

Views

Quotations: "We look at works of art as single large units – but they’re actually composed of hundreds of thousands of individual and tiny units, each one a decision. It’s those units that I’ve been experimenting with throughout my career."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Miss Lipsky reintroduces the drip, splatter and smear of abstract expressionism for notable anti-expressionist purposes... She also demonstrates a very clear identity of her own. Her pictures are very handsome, and it will be interesting to see how she develops what is already a bold pictorial intelligence." Hilton Kramer, American art critic and essayist

Interests

• Artists

  Édouard Manet, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock

• Music & Bands

  Johann Sebastian Bach, Thelonious Monk

Connections

Pat Lipsky has two sons whose names are David and Jonathan.

Father:

Bernard G. Sutton

Mother:

Bernice D. Brown

Son:

David Lipsky

Son:

Jonathan Lipsky

mentor:

Tony Smith

References

• Pat Lipsky: Color Paintings
  2006
• Pat Lipsky: Stain Paintings 1968-1975
  2017