The Cut Surface: Louisa Chase's Eighties Closes This Weekend

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 29, 2026 | 3 MIN READ The Cut Surface: Louisa Chase's Eighties Closes This Weekend At a Glance Louisa Chase: The Eighties at Berry Campbell is worth crossing town for on its last weekend: her largest New York showing in over 25 years, and the surface does something a brush can't. Stand close to Sunset Grip, from 1983, and the first thing that registers isn’t the colour. It’s that the marks aren’t sitting on top of the paint. They’re cut into it. Louisa Chase: The Eighties, at Berry Campbell through 30 May, gathers work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and the writer Jason Andrew, in Two Coats of Paint, gets the method exactly right: “Like a printmaker, Chase etches a scene into the surface of the paint as it dries.” That one line explains the whole room. What “carve, slash, gouge” actually means on a wax-stiffened surface Critics keep reaching for those verbs around Chase, and they’re not wrong, but they treat them as mood. To a painter they read as a recipe. Almost everything here is oil and wax on canvas. The wax is the tell. Cold wax cut into oil stiffens the film and kills the shine, so the paint sets into a firm, matte body that can be drawn back into with the wrong end of a brush, a knife, a comb. That is why the marks read as incised rather than stroked. She isn’t gesturing at a surface. She’s cutting a line that holds, the way a drypoint needle holds a furrow in a plate. The marks aren’t brushed onto these painting s. They’re cut into them. Scale matters to how this lands. Sunset Grip is 84 by 96 inches; Pool, also 1983, is 72 by 96. At that size the incised line stops being a detail and becomes the structure of the whole image, figure and landscape dissolving into marks dragged across the surface. Up close it is almost violent. Step back and it resolves into weather, water, a kind of pressure. A brush cannot make that double reading. A cut surface can. Why Berry Campbell is the right wall for an overlooked ’80s painter Chase ran with Marilyn Minter, Judy Pfaff and Julian Schnabel, studied under Philip Guston, and then mostly dropped out of the story the 1980s told about itself. Berry Campbell has built its program on exactly this kind of repair, putting overlooked postwar painters, many of them women, back on a serious wall. The gallery calls this “the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York City in over 25 years,” and that gap is the point. A room that takes her this seriously is the corrective. So: cross town. This is the last weekend, the show closes 30 May, and a quarter-century is a long time to wait for the next chance to stand this close to the cut. Where it points next is easy to read. The market and the museums have spent a few years now recovering the women who made the eighties and got written out of it. Chase sits squarely in that current. Honestly, I would be surprised if these surfaces stay this available, or this quietly priced, for long. Massa Mardini Artist and writer based in Barcelona. Massa p