Beth Ganz
HIGHLIGHTS
Manhattan Graphic Center
Library of Congress, permanent collection
NYU, permanent collection
New York Historical Society, permanent collection
World Trade Center Memorial Museum, permanent collection
Beth Ganz’s new work is a response to her ongoing inquiry into topography, line, and shape that arise from interstitial spaces. Her reliefs are depicted in both the negative and positive, in all the various techniques she employs: gravure, photography, line drawing, montage. A recent series of hand-painted maps interjects an element of historical exploration and emphasizes the flux between the surface of the image and the photograph’s illusory depth. Each of her works is an invitation to a historical legacy, offering a window into another world.
Travel to foreign lands and mapping exotic landscapes have been a consistent line of inquiry in Beth’s work. She writes: It is possible to characterize my work as an investigation of the relationship between abstraction and landscape. My practice seeks to reveal a profound interconnection within the types of beauty, orderliness, and harmony that emerge in each form. This intuition of unity affects my approach to materials, leading me to abandon the conventional categorizations of media in favor of an approach that moves fluidly between painting, printmaking, photography and drawing.
Her images are both supported and disrupted by the play between negative and positive, surface and depth, landscape image and map-like painted detail. Her use of fragile Kozo paper in conjunction with the weight and mass of the topographies serves the artist’s intent well: the collaged reverse imagery becomes a finely honed dance of mirror image shapes.
Ganz has had several solo exhibitions in New York and throughout the United States; her prints have been included in many group shows in the United States, England, Europe, and India a country and a landscape that has become her muse and touchstone for the past decade.