Biography

“The surfaces of Wolovitz’s paintings, are so layered, so heavily impastoed, you suspect she’d welcome a comparison between her paintings and topographic maps, if not with the earth itself.”

“Wolovitz has clearly looked at the work of three British painters – the luscious colorist Howard Hodgkin, and the rich impastoers Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach- but she is consciously rougher and a more resolute abstractionist than any of those…Her paintings suggest things and events we sense around us, atmospherically and physically, but have never precisely seen.”

Vivian Wolovitz is an American abstract painter and printmaker whose work is deeply connected to the landscape and natural world. Over her extensive career, Wolovitz has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows throughout the US and abroad. Her earliest affiliations were with Marion Locks and Jessica Berwind galleries in Philadelphia. In 1990 she joined Stephen Haller Gallery in New York City where she had two solo shows and participated in more than ten group shows. More recently, she joined Projects Gallery with two solo shows. Wolovitz has shown in private galleries in Philadelpha, New York, Toronto, Miami, and Memphis and public venues including Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine and Performing Arts in Nagoya Japan, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia Print Center, University of Delaware, Maryland Institute, Fairfield University, University of Pennsylvania, Phila Art Alliance, and US Information Agency.

Artist residencies include Lefkada, on the coast of the Ionian sea in Greece, and Bulgaria where she was invited to participate in a two week residency in the town of Balchik on the Black Sea.

She was Professor of Fine Arts at Moore College of Art from 1980-2010 and served as Chair of 2D Fine Arts Department for four years.

Wolovitz’s paintings are characterized by their luminous and atmospheric qualities, achieved through multiple layers of oil paint. She employs techniques such as scoring and scraping to reveal underlying depths, creating complex and textured surfaces that reflect her deep engagement with process and chance. The fields and woods that surround her home in Pennsylvania are an endless source of reference. She moves back and forth between abstraction and figuration, a difficult intersection that comes together in paintings of the terrain, ambiguous spaces, light and dark, branches and trees, and pure abstractions with no recognizable imagery. The mood might suggest a natural event like a hurricane or flood, and a sense that something has happened or is about to happen. What ties it all together is her deep intuitive connection to materials and their ability to physically convey an immediate emotional experience.

Wolovitz’s prints are small scale, intimate etchings and monoprints with figurative and invented iconographic elements. She uses intricate crosshatching to create subtle tonal shifts and finely drawn lines to delineate shapes and figures which emerge from light and dark grounds.