NEW YORK, NY.- Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Julian Lethbridge. The exhibition is on view from January 12 – February 16 at 534 West 21st street.

Julian Lethbridge uses multiple, partially obscured layers of paint to create works of complex and disorienting spatial depth. The paintings have a methodical precision that works through, rather than against, the looseness of the artist’s hand. In a new series made for this exhibition, the dimensions of some of the frames reference the proportions of the human body. Six-foot-tall canvases physically engage the viewer. Upon close inspection, their seemingly random “all over” compositions reveal the trace of a highly choreographed movement of brushstrokes across the canvas.

These new works are a continuation of a process the artist has employed since the mid-1980s, using colored grounds on which rhythmic brushstrokes are overlaid. The grounds, spare underpaintings done in monochrome or with a limited palette, are carved to create burrs and ridges along their surface. These ridges provide an internal, closed structure upon which the highly worked webbing of the surface painting rests.

Julian Lethbridge received his education at Winchester College and Cambridge University. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Tate Gallery (London), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), and The National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.). In 1988, Julian Lethbridge was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award. He lives and works in New York.