Zoe Longfield: A World of One’s Own

A World of One's Own presents rarely seen paintings and works on paper made by Zoe Longfield between 1948 and 1950. It is Van Doren Waxter's second solo exhibition of the artist since the gallery took on exclusive representation of the Zoe Longfield Estate. After a rigorous and wide-ranging training in painting at the California School of Fine Arts, where she studied under Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Clyfford Still, Longfield produced, from the late 1940s into the early 1950s, a body of esoteric and strikingly original paintings that sought, in her own words, to "solve those problems peculiar to painting." Often built from muted colors, her paintings feel mysteriously light and fluid. Rather than being sealed in by paint, the canvas is set free, becoming something beyond an object. Their atmosphere is closer to that of the Surrealists than to the work of her teachers Diebenkorn and Park, whose color and light grew out of the landscapes of the Bay Area. Her wholly abstract shapes, interlaced with eerie grays and mellifluous pinks and purples, are released from any association with familiar forms, reflecting an inner world rather than an outer one. The reality Longfield inhabited was, to borrow Virginia Woolf's description of life in a man's world, "erratic and undependable," rife with discrimination and doubt. As one of the first generation of Bay Area Abstract Expressionists, she had access to only a handful of commercial galleries and was overlooked while the art world favored her male peers. Without the illusion of praise or validation, she did perhaps the most valuable thing an artist can do: she painted because it mattered to her. Discovered in the home where she lived until her death in 2013, her canvases are charged with the instinct of an introspective artist and her unmistakably singular voice.