Haines Opens Patsy Krebs: Equations on May 17

Patsy Krebs, Pirouette (pale sienna/alizarin crimson), 1994; Untitled (White - Black w/ Green), 2009, photo: Shaun Roberts; Open (Fan Series), 2012

From the gallery:

Haines Gallery proudly presents Equations, our ninth solo exhibition with Northern California painter Patsy Krebs (b. 1940, lives and works in Inverness, CA). Since the 1970s, Krebs has created canvases that imbue abstract geometry with a lush sensualism. Her work exemplifies the restrained dignity of minimalism at its very best— elegant, intelligent, and enigmatic. Equations draws upon three decades of Krebs’ practice, ranging from paintings created during the early 1990s to newly completed works from 2024. Much like Krebs’ paintings themselves, which reveal themselves slowly and reward extended viewing, the exhibition will evolve over time; the regular addition of new works from distinct but related series within an oeuvre defined by Krebs’ contemplative, refined sensibility and her long-standing preoccupation with our perceptions of color, light, and space. Krebs spent the early 1960s in New York, where she was part of a community of artists that included Dean Fleming, Leo Valledor, and Tamara Melcher. The carefully plotted, intersecting geometric elements of her Fan series—the earliest works in the show—nod to the influence of 1960s geometric abstraction on her practice, as well as East Asian paintings, scrolls, and screens. Over the last two decades, Krebs’ pursuit of spatial ambiguity has taken on a more veiled, complex quality, achieved through the interplay of translucency and transparency, rather than with hard-edged forms. The exhibition includes several of the terraced, symmetrical compositions that Krebs has turned to time and again. In these works, the artist creates mesmerizing surfaces through innumerable layers of thinned acrylic washes, building up to a central square or rectangular form that hovers within the painting, simultaneously focusing and dissolving from view. Krebs’ masterful layering of closely related values and hues creates the illusion of depth and motion within the canvas. As a result, even the darkest paintings in the exhibition—the columnar, twilight-hued Nocturne works from 2024—seem to pulse with interior light, and our perspectives shift between gazing into and out from these tremulous thresholds.

Equations includes several series executed in watercolor, where the precision of her acrylic paintings is traded for fluidity and mutability. In her Elysion series—named for the Elysian Fields in Greek mythology, a place after life for the gods’ favored warriors, at the western edges of the world—elongated rectangular panels are bisected by a thin horizontal line, from which atmospheric washes of color appear to arise and descend. The works formally suggest the junction of earth and sky, but rather than addressing the physical landscape, Elysion contemplates our human perception of the horizon as “both distance and boundary. It is as far as we can see in a given direction, and the inside edge of what is seeable.” Each painting presents an openness, an expanse, as well as an imaginary edge or border. Reflecting on the exhibition’s title, the artist explains, “It ties to my feeling about mathematics and art being the only languages we have with which to talk about what is inexpressible in words.” Krebs’ paintings reach for the ineffable, distilling her keen observations of formal traditions, systems of knowledge, and natural phenomena into spare, elegantly reduced compositions that slowly, quietly reveal their complexities. Her canvases invite us into their tranquil confines, while retaining a core of mystery and spirit.