Biography:

Betsy Podlach recieved her BA in English literature and fiction writing at Harvard University, where she was a Watson Scholar. While studying painting at the New York Studio School and the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy, she received awards from the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the Seligman von Simson Foundation as well as several private grants and commissions. She received her MFA in Sculpture 2000 from New York Academy of Art, New York.
Her paintings are about relationships. They are created through a personal, abstract conception of form, space and light. She says, "I work from direct observation - the beauty of objects in light, the anatomy or the landscape - along with my unconscious. In doing so, I try to combine three-dimensional form and depth with the flat picture plane into a uniquely painted space. I work with color to create a light coming from within the picture, stillness that reverberates. I use nature, these formal principles, and my imagination to form a personal image."

Podlach, who lives and works in New York City, is currently represented by galleries in New York, Key West, and Art Cabinet Nantucket on Nantucket Island. Her work is in private collections in New York City and Italy, including the collection of Princess Donatella Borghese in Rome, and the corporate collection of Pfizer, Inc., in New York.

New York-based artist Betsy Podlach has been painting landscape, still-life, and figural works for nearly a decade. Her ostensibly sober and effortless compositions are brightly illuminated stages upon which the most discreet Chekovian dramas may potentially unfold.

Formally speaking, Podlach's palette of frosty blues, reds and oranges laid on back-lit canvases render her subjects icons of our time. As her flowers and women appear enraptured by halos of light and mystery, myriad shades of sun- drenched whites create milieus worthy of idolized portrayals of femininity, as well as the most tender or exotic bouquets.

In her still-lives, multiple layers of thickly clustered bright colors suggest arrangements of flowers that are set in front of, at sometime, thickly tinted and, others, luminescent white screen. At times, barely decipherable lines and, at others, boldly geometric shapes define the spaces of Podlach's pictures. In either case, constellations of intertwined flora in the middle of the painting are veiled behind luminous curtains of pallor.

Ultimately, however, it is her evocative [self-] portraits for which Podlach is most celebrated, among fans and collectors alike. At once brash and bashful, she creates her implicitly erotic figures following the long-standing tradition which begins with Classical Greek and Roman mythology. The erotic - derived from eros, the Greek word for physical love for another person (in contrast to agape the spiritual love for a god) - has permeated Western & Eastern art's visual life for millennia. According to this tradition's iconography, love, sex, religion, and magic are inspirations for and symbolic promotion of: human fertility; spiritual powers; and defense against malevolent forces, to name but a few motives.

Not unlike Renaissance images, Podlach's women stand somewhere between Greek mythological deities and Biblical heroines. (In these two contesting traditions, [Birth of] Venus and Leda [and the Swan] vie with Susanna [and the Elders] and Judith [and Holofernes] .as well as representations of the most unlikely heroine, Mary Magdalene.)

On the one hand, her figure's ashen nakedness relates them to Greco-Roman goddesses. On the other hand, their fine and slender bodies convey an undeniable sense of youthful innocence which defies ancient (fertility) divinities' voluptuousness. Podlach's women embody the kind of abstemious fragility - resulting either from gentle prudence or steadfast devotion - that endows them with seductive powers of angelic [celestial] type.

Still, the figures' air of asceticism and reticence contradicts their frank and bold gaze at the viewer. In these auto-portraits, the artist's haunting presence brims with wistful longings of a woman who is aware of her own desiring body, and desirability. Podlach's deceptively impenetrable looks draw the viewer into private arenas where sacro et profano longings may encounter, and gratify one another.

By allowing dichotomies of boldness and tenderness to co-exist, Betsy Podlach's oeuvre challenges erotic forms and expressive spheres of (still-) life which, until very recently, have been the domain of male artists.