TESSA PERUTZ

Tessa Perutz was born in Chicago and received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Living and working in Brussels and New York, Perutz is most notably recognised as a contemporary landscape painter. Curator Evelyn Simons describes Perutz’s landscapes as being:

“...driven by centrifugal movement. Luring you in with their appealing and buoyant colours, only to disorient you once your gaze is hooked. Trees, bushes, lakes, paths and flowers are – on a closer look – difficult to discern. Perutz paints generously and with utter precision. Paint is applied in thick but homogeneous layers; the compositions seem to have been made up of cutouts. Their whimsical outlines transform volumes into surrounding negative spaces and vice versa, conveying a density in which every element stands on the same plane. This plays out a tension between idyll and confusion, whirling up the perspective to make you feel encapsulated by these opaque universes.” 

Perutz’s artworks function as psychological landscapes, touring the fields and valleys of earth as well as the inner mind. Her artwork is a testimony to spontaneous exploration: pinpointed with anecdotes, hasty jottings and existential ponderings. Perutz’s oeuvre is shaped by processes of conceptualisation and intuition, organically intertwining and informing one another.

In addition to the natural landscape, Perutz explores the human body in comparison, depicting human curvature as it mirrors the earth’s natural peaks and valleys. However, instead of the canonical representation of the female figure painted by male artists throughout the ages, her gaze shifts to the male form instead. This can be seen as a female-forward contribution to realigning the male-driven historical trajectories that underpin the art world.