Lizbeth Mitty

Lizbeth Mitty's body of work has long been concerned with amplifying the intrinsic abstract beauty of deteriorating corners of urban architecture and interiors.  For much of her career, scrap yards and other sites of urban devastation fascinated the artist as locations of organized chaos; formally beautiful yet apocalyptic and terrifying. In Mitty's landscapes, the cyclicality of nature and the mutability of things in times of excess are subliminal driving forces.  

Mitty responded to the events of 2020 by moving from a focus on themes around decay and decadence to painting ebullient, postcard-perfect memories.  With fast-moving wet into wet paint, a method of pouring paint from earlier works, these images arise out of constant potential change.  Mitty's idyllic landscapes allow the preservation of a peaceful moment that too often gives way to the ineluctable uncertainty of the future of these places. An array of methods and tools are used to create the image where, for a moment, the viewer is offered elegance, hope, and optimism.

“Acutely observed, remembered and then re-imagined, these futuristic scenes are not so much renditions of a specific location as they are dizzying translations in paint of Mitty's wonderment at the endless variety of visual information offered up by her subjects.” — Art in America, January 2006

Born in Queens, NY to a family of artists, inventors and actors, Lizbeth Mitty grew up painting and writing. Mitty's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in both the United States and abroad and is held in public and private collections including the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York State Museum, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Zimmerli Archive, The U.S. State Department, and Trierenberg Holding AG (Austria). Lizbeth Mitty's studio is located in Brooklyn, NY.