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Louise Abrams
Louise Abrams
(1941-2019)
Louise S. Abrams (1941–2019) was a New York native who studied in the Art Students League, the New School, and in Mexico at the Instituto Allende. She received her BA and did graduate work in the Fine Arts Department at CUNY. She had several gallery shows in the mid 1970s including Cloud Gallery and Auction 393 in June 1975. She held her first solo show of sculpture and ink drawings at Pleiades Gallery in the fall of 1975. Abrams’s work and study has been interrupted throughout her life with severe mental and emotional challenges and has spent significant periods of her life in various institutions. She is an example of one whose illness has opened alternative portals of visual creativity. She may have produced her work in creative bursts. She seems to have held on to the body of her work, all of which was auctioned by court order after her death. Plans have been underway for a posthumous retrospective, “Louise Abrams: ‘An Artist from Here & Beyond’.” She is buried in Mount Ararat Cemetery in Lindenhurst, New York.
Her work has been described as “a microscopic view of life” and “Native American, Aboriginal, Olmec inspired and visionary.” Any number of themes and motifs—possibly visions—dominate the few thousand works comprising the total of Abrams’ work from the 1970s to the early 2000s. She numbered each painting rather than gave them titles. Some she dated on the back and sometimes listed the paints she used. She signed her works with a stylized rubber stamp on the back. She also produced small stone and wood sculptures in a similar style.
With this rediscovery, the quality of Abrams’s work can be appreciated against the work of other outsider visionaries both nationally and internationally. Abrams’s lacked the nurturing support of a cohesive art community, but her depictions of dreamlike faces and bodies distorted into patterns of line and stippling, and juxtaposing warm and cool bold colors, strongly recall similar depictions by visionary artists around the globe.
Her work has been described as “a microscopic view of life” and “Native American, Aboriginal, Olmec inspired and visionary.” Any number of themes and motifs—possibly visions—dominate the few thousand works comprising the total of Abrams’ work from the 1970s to the early 2000s. She numbered each painting rather than gave them titles. Some she dated on the back and sometimes listed the paints she used. She signed her works with a stylized rubber stamp on the back. She also produced small stone and wood sculptures in a similar style.
With this rediscovery, the quality of Abrams’s work can be appreciated against the work of other outsider visionaries both nationally and internationally. Abrams’s lacked the nurturing support of a cohesive art community, but her depictions of dreamlike faces and bodies distorted into patterns of line and stippling, and juxtaposing warm and cool bold colors, strongly recall similar depictions by visionary artists around the globe.
