Louise Belcourt's Hedgeland Paintings at Jeff Bailey Gallery Explore Abstraction and Landscape

Louise Belcourt's exhibition at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City runs from February 17 to March 27, featuring twelve new paintings that intensify her exploration of abstraction and landscape. The artist, who splits her time between Brooklyn and Quebec, draws inspiration from maritime Quebec's vast, hedge-ribbed moraines and high-latitude skies. Her work mingles painting space with real space, using wry, incestuous flair to prod abstraction by returning it to the land, akin to early American Modernists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, and Arthur Dove. The Hedgeland series centers on a palette of yellow-greens and aqua-blues, with chromatic exactitude creating icy cool effects, while intrusions of pure red in paintings #12, #13, and #14 add subtle intensity. In Hedgeland Painting #9, landforms wrap around rectangular extrusions like graphics on a cereal box, creating an oxymoronic effect reminiscent of Magritte's reflexive easel paintings. Hedgeland Painting #11 closes exits, stacking canvases and children's blocks against a sky-like wall, where image and surface vie for primacy. Belcourt's brushwork remains stubbornly fluid, with details solidifying flow to reveal a flinty reticence, combining hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit to undermine stylistic stasis. The exhibition is located at 511 W 25th Street, Second Floor, with contact number 212 989 0156.