Louise P. Sloane

Artist Information

Louise P. Sloane (b. 1952) has been active as an abstract painter since 1974, infusing her works with personal text that motivates her own experimentation. Sloane joins a mighty group of great artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Anton Albers, and Barnett Newman. Like these monumental artists before her, she has dedicated her life’s work to exploring the limitless possibilities of color.
Sloane’s visual language emanates from a long and rich tradition in art history, celebrating both color and the human inclination toward mark-making. Having studied under the renowned contemporary painter Brice Marden and having shown her work alongside Frank Stella in 1970s New York, Sloane brings a deep and diverse artistic background to her practice. Originally working with a palette knife and infusing beeswax and pigment powder, her early techniques laid the foundation for her current detail-oriented works. Typically divided into rectangles or squares, the quadrangle has become a repetitive motif, often centrally featured within the context of a grid.
In contrast with her iterative geometries, it is important to Sloane that the works present themselves as human-made objects. Thick paint constructs repetitive handmade patterns, the physical motion of her brush strokes revealing the humanity of her practice. Inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, her painstakingly written and overwritten inscriptions become a form of private meditation and poetry. Transformed into relief and abstracted through color blocking, the text is interpreted through its physicality, not its meaning. Contrasting color choices intensify the dimensionality of the surface texture. Sloane uses color straight-up, without mixing, allowing blending to take place optically as one color reacts to the other—red against green, or blue against yellow. The elements of mark-making, color, and geometry compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, and unifying her interests in the form of the square.

Sloane’s work has been featured in numerous institutional collections, including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Cornell Museum of Art and History. Her pieces are also part of the permanent collections at the Heckscher Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Notably, Yeshiva University holds several of her paintings featuring the Shema in Hebrew, highlighting her work’s cultural and spiritual significance.

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