Gabriele Evertz
Gabriele Evertz: Colors Make Light
March 15, 2025 - May 3, 2025
Gabriele Evertz: Colors Make Light
March 15 – May 3, 2025
Scientists tell you that in nature, light makes the color. But a painter will tell you that colors make light. - Gabriele Evertz, 2022
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Gabriele Evertz: Colors Make Light, the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Born and raised near Berlin, Germany, Evertz (b. 1945) identifies as a color painter, and wields her extensive historical and theoretical knowledge of the subject in pursuit of sensorially joyous outcomes. Despite a precise and disciplined methodology, which fuses the scientific order of the color wheel with the exacting geometry of angle and line, her paintings are not dispassionate in intent or effect but are instead deeply concerned with emotional response. The relationship between the painter and her canvas, and in turn between the painting and the viewer, is a private exploratory experience focused around the pleasures of being a living, sensing creature.
Evertz’s paintings center the essential role of the viewer’s active observation, as the energy and oscillating effects of their colors come alive and transform within the eye and mind. The perfection of the painted surface, executed in achromatic diagonals and vertical passages of pure, spectral color, removes the hand of the artist entirely. The passive physical function of light reflecting off pigment and into the eye is transmuted by the observer’s perception and memory, resulting in a complex psychological and emotional experience particular to each viewer. Without their engagement, Evertz asserts, the painting does not exist. In this way, viewing her works becomes not just an act of seeing, but an act of creation as well.
Gabriele Evertz taught painting at Hunter College in New York from 1990-2018. She is a key member of the renowned Hunter Color School, alongside other color painters such as Vincent Longo, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. Evertz is a member of the prestigious American Abstract Artists, nominated by the late artist Mac Wells in 1996. Her works are included in numerous public collections worldwide, including the British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum; Harvard University Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo de Art Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, Library Special Collection, New York; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Princeton University Library; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.