Francie Lyshak

Works
Overview

 Lyshak’s aesthetic has undergone a gradual shift from illustrative figuration toward pure color field and monochrome abstraction, in some works combined with incised texts that repeat simple words and phrases. Her art remains directed toward contemplation of the self, but in her most recent canvases, she allows the material of paint itself to take center stage, establishing open fields of color and texture that allow for more open-ended interpretation. Dispensing with identifiable narrative and symbolism, she conjures moods and atmospheres that prompt a meditative gaze, a calm, mindful—and hard-won—form of looking.

--- Michael Wilson

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” New York painter Francie Lyshak cites Socrates’s irreducible maxim as an idea common to every phase of her extensive and affecting body of work. Often turning her focus inward to stare down and pick apart a lifetime of personal experience—some of it highly traumatic—she offers viewers a cascade of stories and spaces into which they can immerse themselves spiritually and emotionally as well as visually. Drawing on a training and professional career in art therapy, Lyshak wields her knowledge of painting as a tool for surveying the landscapes of mind and heart.

Lyshak began her artistic journey in Manhattan’s East Village in the 1970s, interacting with an extraordinary community of artists, musicians, and writers including Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz—a scene she documented in a series of interviews and images titled The Bar. During this period, Lyshak developed a style of painting that deviated from the prevailing trends of minimalism, Pop, and conceptual art. Combining dreamlike images of dolls and toys with human and animal figures, she set out to explore psychological themes from a feminist perspective, and in 1993 staged an exhibition that examined her own recovery from sexual abuse.

In the years following this pivotal undertaking, Lyshak’s aesthetic has undergone a gradual shift from illustrative figuration toward pure color field and monochrome abstraction, in some works combined with incised texts that repeat simple words and phrases. Her art remains directed toward contemplation of the self, but in her most recent canvases, she allows the material of paint itself to take center stage, establishing open fields of color and texture that allow for more open-ended interpretation. Dispensing with identifiable narrative and symbolism, she conjures moods and atmospheres that prompt a meditative gaze, a calm, mindful—and hard-won—form of looking.

---Michael Wilson

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Review of Abstract Singularity by Jonathan Goodman in Art511mag.com
View artist website
Video
Biography

Lyshak began her artistic career in New York’s East Village in the 1970s, developing a style of painting that explores emotional themes from a feminist perspective. In 1993, she staged a key exhibition, “The Secret,” that explored her recovery from childhood sexual abuse, and published an accompanying book of the same title. After this project, Lyshak’s aesthetic began a gradual shift from figuration toward color field and monochrome abstraction, and work with incised handwritten text.

 

Francie Lyshak studied art history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, then traveled to Paris to study painting for a summer. Returning to the United States, she studied for a BFA at the Center for Creative Studies and Wayne State University, both in Detroit. After earning an MPS in Creative Arts Therapy from Pratt Institute, New York, she designed and led community art service programs in New York and New Orleans and launched an art therapy program at Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. This professional immersion in art as a therapeutic tool influenced the focus of her subsequent visual practice on psychological experience.

 

Francie Lyshak has exhibited in solo exhibitions at venues around New York including, most often, La Mama La Galleria and Carter Burden Gallery. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including La Mama La Galleria, Denise Bibro Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery, RC Fine Arts, Barbara Ann Levy Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Carter Burden Gallery, and Stephen Harvey Fine Arts, showing work with curators and jurors including Alice Neel, Patterson Sims, and Paulina Pobocha.

 

Lyshak is the recipient of awards at competitions and events including the First Annual Prize Competition, Provincetown Arts Association and Museum; Museum of the Hudson Highlands Fourth Annual Competition, Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY; and Annual Faber Birren National Color Award. An upcoming one-person exhibition of her work is scheduled at The Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin and Marshall College in 2021

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Exhibitions
Events
Bibliography

Goodman, Jonathan,  Abstract Singularity, June 2020 Art511mag.com 

Instagram Virtual Studio Visit, Cross Contemporary Art, June 2020, 

Francie Lyshak-About Painting at Carter Burden Gallery 5th Anniversary Show Catalogue, 2014. 
Indiana, Gary. One Brief Scuzzy Moment. New York Magazine, 12/6/04. pp. 48-52
KBOO Radio, Portland, Oregon. Panelist on July 30, 2002, on the topic of child abuse
Lyshak-Stelzer, F. The Secret: Art & Healing from Sexual Abuse, Safer Society Press, Brandon, VT, 1999
Vojtko, J. Spirts of the Deep: Francie Lyshak and Basil Twist at the Ocean of Infinite Metaphor, pp. 5-11. Review, 10-1-98
Vojtko, J. The Science and Art of Pain Management: Notes on the Nascent of Surrealist Epiphany, p. 11. Review, 1-15-98.

Blog
Video
Virtual exhibition

Francie Lyshak's Virtual Museum Exhibition

 Throughout the history of art, but especially in the last 150 years or so, there have been numerous painters whose works have been either inspired by dreams or carry a dreamlike resonance. One thinks of French Symbolists like Gustave Moreau or the fiercely original Henri Rousseau or any number of Surrealists who claimed to be guided by the promptings of the unconscious. Improbable events take place in unusual settings. A fiddler plays by firelight at the edge of gently roaring surf. A newly wedded couple floats in a small boat, navigating choppy waters filled with seals, dolphins, and what look to be aquatic dinosaurs. Francie Lyshak's paintings from this show, most from a roughly ten-year period in the late 1980s and mid-90s, share the same qualities of enchantment and surprise-a certain dreaminess, if you will-that animates works by Rousseau or even Marc Chagall.