Margrit Lewczuk United States, b. 1952

Painter Margrit Lewczuk’s career was marred in 1999 by a fire that destroyed the contents of her Chelsea studio. Sixteen years later, she assembled a new oeuvre of vibrant paintings, drawings, and cut-outs while living and working in her Brooklyn home with her husband, fellow impassioned artist and professor Bill Jensen. The artist’s influences are not easily identifiable; in her work one might sense the organic symmetry of Ukrainian or Mexican folk art, the vibrating illusions of ’60s Op art or Islamic textiles, the expressively abstracted mathematics of Agnes Martin, the macro focus and whimsy of Hilma af Klint, or the playfully curved shapes and lively palettes of Henri Matisse or Yayoi Kusama. In devotion to the theme of her own transformation and renewal after disaster, her new work features symbols of rebirth such as eggs, angels, crosses, and the chrysalis. With these hopeful themes, she doesn’t mourn the past; she celebrates the potential of the present and future, affirming the power of long change, in gestation, incubation, and meditation.