Laurie Fendrich (born 1948) is an American artist, writer and educator based in New York City, best known for geometric abstract paintings that balance playfulness and sophistication. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, a retrospective at the Williamson Gallery at Scripps College (2010), and group shows at MoMA PS1, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design, among many venues. She has received reviews in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, ARTnews Partisan Review, and New York Magazine. Fendrich has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2016), Brown Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2009, 2017), and National Endowment for the Arts (1983–4). She has been an educator for more than four decades, notably at Hofstra University (1989–2014), and a regular essayist for The Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Fendrich's art has been described as a "deft blending of mid-twentieth century Cubism and biomorphism" that avoids easy harmony, playing a pictorial game of "part playground, part calculated wager against chaos." Critic Hilton Kramer characterized her work as "devoid of solemnity, dogmatism and existential angst," with an undercurrent of humor that embraces the worldly as it renegotiates the relationship between abstraction and representation in modernist painting.
Life and career
Fendrich was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1948 and attended Mount Holyoke College, where she studied painting, but graduated with a political science degree (1970), considering it a more practical major. She worked in publishing for three years, traveled across the country, and in 1975, enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1978), where she studied painting with professors Ray Yoshida and Richard Loving. She met her future husband, artist and critic Peter Plagens, in Chicago; they would marry in 1981 and, after living in California and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, move to New York City in 1985.
Fendrich has shown in museums, universities and galleries across the U.S., notably solo exhibitions at John Davis and E. M. Donahue in New York (1990s), Jan Cicero in Chicago (1981–1993), Gary Snyder Fine Art and Katharina Rich Perlow in New York (2000s), and Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles (2016). She lives and works in New York City and Callicoon Center, New York, and shares a studio with Plagens.
Work
Critics identify Fendrich as an artist whose work makes a case for the viability of geometric abstraction and the modernist tradition, while simultaneously taking a knowing jab at its quest for purity. Fendrich notes her inclination toward a Platonic, "modernist, optimistic spirit that strives for the eternal and universal." She cites 1930s American artists Stuart Davis and George L. K. Morris, Esphyr Slobodkina, and Russian Constructivism as influences; other touchstones include Cubist Juan Gris, early American comics, and Jane Austen. Art historian Mark Stevens likened Fendrich's sensibility to Austen's tempered mix of passion, reason and humor, a balancing act others observe makes Fendrich's work "hum with friction" as it seeks a "fusion of rationality and emotion, order and ardor," freedom and limitation, stasis and dynamism.
Painting
In her early work, Fendrich created large abstractions dominated by triangular forms and tonal contrast, seeking, in her words, to "make the most eye-grabbing, dynamic painting … while not sacrificing harmony and balance." In the 1990s, she reduced her work's scale in reaction against the bombastic art of the day, and crucially, discovered Russian Constructivism and the oval and irregular bulbous forms of her mature work, which posed greater compositional challenges. Since that time, her vocabulary of interlocking, jigsaw–puzzle shapes orbiting complex, off-kilter compositions has remained fairly consistent. Her later work (e.g., My Own Dolly, 2018), which Art in America called "her jauntiest, most complex and absorbing ever," has broadened to include near-cartoony forms alluding to the figure and Pop art, a more subdued palette, variation in the scale of shapes, and airier compositions.