BIO

Beth Gilfilen is a painter based in New York City. She is currently an artist resident at PS122 in Manhattan and has been awarded residencies from The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo, The Golden Foundation for the Arts, Gallery Aferro, Art Cake, The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and The Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, among others. She received an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA with an emphasis in drawing from the University of Cincinnati.

Recent solo exhibitions include Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA (2018, 2025); Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT (2024) and Yi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2023). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY and Equity Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been written about in Two Coats of Paint, ArtSpiel, The New Criterion, The Boston Globe, The Newark Star-Ledger and The New York Times.

Gilfilen’s large-scale paintings are highly dependent on color and often employ an exploratory line that seems to stem directly from the nervous system. An improvisational approach dominates, and the work is built through a generative process of layering, negating and remaking. She develops the paintings over extended periods of time and a topography of movements is woven into dense, atmospheric spaces.

Smaller-scale works on paper embrace the immediacy of the mark, and are informed by visits to sites that resonate emotionally or psychologically. Finding a visual rhythm is of interest to her, and that can happen both spontaneously and through repeated iterations within the work. Form is captured through the senses.

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