Louise Belcourt, born in Montreal, Quebec 1961, has resided in New York City since 1984. Called a “Physical Abstractionist” by Roberta Smith for The New York Times (1996) her work has evolved from pure abstraction, through a form of narrative representation to a personal iconography that combines abstracted landscape and urban architecture. More recent work has flora and fauna elements creeping in.
Her paintings are formally rigorous, deceptively simple, and almost sculptural in intent. They are also a mixture of her two lives as she spends part of each year in rural Canada and part in the dense environment of the city. As David Brody for ArtCritical (2010) put it: “Hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit seem to combine in Belcourt’s work.”
Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Paris, Philadelphia ,San Francisco, and Quebec and in group exhibitions in Europe and across the United States, including at The Brooklyn Museum; The Fleming Museum, Vermont; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, North Carolina. Collections include The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Progressive Corporation, and Deutsche Bank. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2000, 2017, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation 1984, 1985 and the New York Foundation for the Arts 2015 in addition to the John.Simon Guggenheim Foundation 2012.
Her paintings are formally rigorous, deceptively simple, and almost sculptural in intent. They are also a mixture of her two lives as she spends part of each year in rural Canada and part in the dense environment of the city. As David Brody for ArtCritical (2010) put it: “Hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit seem to combine in Belcourt’s work.”
Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Paris, Philadelphia ,San Francisco, and Quebec and in group exhibitions in Europe and across the United States, including at The Brooklyn Museum; The Fleming Museum, Vermont; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, North Carolina. Collections include The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Progressive Corporation, and Deutsche Bank. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2000, 2017, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation 1984, 1985 and the New York Foundation for the Arts 2015 in addition to the John.Simon Guggenheim Foundation 2012.
