Louise P Sloane At M & M Fine Art, Southampton, NY

Since 1974 Louise P. Sloane has been engaged in the studio as an abstract painter.  Each of her works are infused with highly personal text that inspires and motivates her to keep growing and experimenting. Her paintings emanate from a long and rich tradition in art history. The visual language of her paintings embrace the legacy of reductive and minimalist ideologies while celebrating the beauty of color, and a human affinity for mark making.

Sloane joins the ranks of a small but mighty group of great artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Josef Albers and Barnett Newman. Like these monumental artists before her, she has dedicated her life's work to exploring the limitless possibilities of a single theme; an insistence on color.

The work focuses upon geometric forms, grids and patterns. These detail-oriented works are typically divided into rectangles or squares. The square has become a repetitive motif, which along with the grid provides structure for all of these paintings. Similar compositional principles underlie each work with some slight modifications. Commonly the image is divided into five parts:  four rectangles and a central square. Whether the square is dimensionally similar to the outer rectangles or not, it always dominates, creating a central core for the flow of the painting.  It is important that the works present themselves as human made objects. Not wanting to obfuscate the traditional precepts of reductive art, she utilizes this rich past and moves forward through her modifications and additions.   The flaws and imperfections of the repetitive handmade patterns and physical motion and depth of paint are accentuated by the geometric formalities within the paintings’ structure.  Regardless of the painting’s texture and color, the square prevails, providing harmony and unity. The complex color contrasts intensify the three dimensionality of the texture, and all compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, fusing her interests in geometry, color, and light.

Sloane's new body of work continues to explore the ideology of breaking free from the confines of the material world. In 2019 and 2020, inspired by both Hilma af Klint and Kazimir Malevich, Sloane began experimenting with a wider color pallete and new geometric forms. The rectangles and squares that have always felt anchored to the center of her paintings have now become untethered. These shapes now feel weightless, unbound by the gravitational pull tugging at them from the grid upon which they appear. The buoyancy of these geometric forms creates a tension within the rectangular grid, and they feel as if they might float off the wall.

Her paintings have been shown in a multitude of museums including, the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Cornell Museum of Art and History. Sloane's works are in the permanent collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Yeshiva University Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Sidney and Francis Lewis Collection).