Bethany Czarnecki

Bethany Czarnecki creates abstract paintings that project an atmospheric sense of place while exploring the paradoxes and complexities of the female form and its representation. Her swirling compositions investigate themes of gender, identity, the human psyche, and sensuality. Working slowly with oil paint, Czarnecki carves out multiple layers of concentric, biomorphic shapes that radiate chromatic planes. Ranging from opaque color fields to translucent overlays, nested silhouettes bend and bloom as they foster complex relationships within each composition. The artist's use of repetitive forms signifies a distortion of time and place that alludes to dreamscapes, while color becomes a carrier of emotion that ultimately reveals the unseen.

Bethany Czarnecki's paintings bring the vibrant energy of sensuality and conception to the surface, exuding an almost supernatural presence. Each work is delicately rendered in thin layers of oil paint, the artist's brush gliding steadily and slowly across the canvas to produce a rich and luscious surface. By spending time with these forms and basking in their pulsing intensity, the paintings erupt in the eye of the beholder. It is in this way that Czarnecki envelops the viewer in a transcendently ambiguous, yet unmistakably female, sensory experience.

Czarnecki’s recent work continues her exploration into the essence of femininity while representing an experimental departure from her established painting techniques. The artist’s new works exhibit a more painterly hand, deviating from her previous commitment to fine lines and a perfectly smooth finish and instead incorporating a more visible brush stroke. The resulting looser, more gestural emotion merges with a wider range of tonal variation, with the artist incorporating deeper hues that further highlight the light and shadow aspects of her work. The outcome is paintings infused with a deliberate tension, a controversy within each work that aims to shift each viewer through an intimate and individualized experience. The multi-dimensional perspective fabricated by Czarnecki’s newly reimagined biomorphic shapes transports each viewer into their internal landscape, at times feeling they are deep within the composition and at others feeling as though they are floating above it, viewing it from an aerial perspective.

The artist’s process is distinct, both in its intuitiveness and its physicality. Czarnecki works with her canvases laid flat, closely hovering over them and rotating the canvases as she works, allowing the final orientation of the work to reveal itself only once the painting is nearly complete. When in her studio, Czarnecki focuses on movement and allows it to inform every action. From mixing to layering to intuitively forming lines, the artist’s energy is slow and meticulous. Her painting process is visceral and her commitment to following intuition means that each action is a response to the last rather than the next step on a planned course. Her instincts extend into her mastery of color, achieved through her savvy layering of viscosities, pigments, and hues, embedding her works with a sensorial, immersive, and vibrational life force.

How Czarnecki evokes the feminine through reference to the various smooth earthly folds (and enfoldments) initially connects her to the lineage of Judy Chicago, Huguette Caland, and of course, Georgia O'Keeffe. Czarnecki, however, errs closer to the Transcendentalist painters than those artists, seeming to flirt with the spiritualism of painters like Agnes Pelton or Hilma af Klint without going into astrology, symbols, or symmetry. 

Bethany Czarnecki has presented three sold-out solo exhibitions with Massey Klein Gallery. Her work has been exhibited by the gallery at the Dallas Art Fair (in 2024 and 2023), in a solo presentation at Future Fair in New York City, where the sold-out booth received a press mention in Artillery, and in an upcoming solo presentation at UNTITLED Art, Miami Beach 2024.

In 2024, Czarnecki completed a residency with the prestigious Fores Project. The artist has exhibited internationally, with notable recent exhibitions including a group exhibition at SHRINE in New York City, a group exhibition at Phillips in New York City, a solo exhibition at Public Service Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden, a group exhibition at Andrew Reed Gallery in Miami, a two-person exhibition at F2T Gallery in Milan, and a group exhibition at Jack Siebert Projects in Los Angeles.

In 2023, Czarnecki was featured in New American Paintings, Northeast, Issue #164, selected by juror Leila Grothe of The Baltimore Museum of Art. The artist has additionally appeared in numerous print and online publications, including BOMB Magazine, Forbes, The Brooklyn Rail, Interlocutor Magazine, HypeBeast, Artillery, ArtPlugged, Metal Magazine, Widewalls, Elephant (where she was featured as October 2021’s ‘artist to watch’), Matrons and Mistresses, Two Coats of Paint, and ArtZealous. Her work is in the permanent collections of Capital One Bank and Citizens Bank, and several noteworthy private collections.