Crises
Beth Livensperger

Beth Livensperger’s Crises examines the underlying tension within our collective relationships to culturally-normalized instutitions such as courts, museums, and schools. Depicting a delicate balance between power, restriction, and threat, Livensperger explores individual agency within the public sphere.

The architecture in her works is overwhelming, detailed with blank windows and yawning doors. Figures mill aimlessly, gawking, distracted or bored. Featureless, dowdy, and often reduced to silhouettes, the figures in her paintings are passive, not agents of change or disruption–dwarfed by the ominous buildings, her figures are confined by these insitutional spaces. Concrete barriers, security gates and even oversized potted plants control the motion of vehicles and people. The paintings ultimately hover between the pleasures of color and gesture and an anxiety conjured by the contrasts throughout the series.

About the Artist
Beth Livensperger is a painter who lives in Queens and works in Brooklyn. She has exhibited widely within New York City and beyond. Currently, Livensperger has a studio through Chashama’s Space to Create program and she has been an artist in residence at Abrons Art Center in New York City as well as the Vermont Studio Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, among others. She holds a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union and an M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art.

For more info, visit her site: bethlivensperger.com or contact: beth.livensperger@gmail.com