Bio

Beth Gilfilen is an artist based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA, 2025 and 2018; Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT, 2024 and Yi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2023. Group exhibitions include Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Bronx Museum, NY and Equity Gallery, New York, NY among others.

Currently, Beth is an artist resident at Art Cake in Brooklyn, NY. She has also been awarded residencies from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Yaddo, The Golden Foundation for the Arts, Gallery Aferro, The Skopelos Foundation for the Arts and Oehme Graphics. She has received fellowships from The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Studio Immersion Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program and Aljira Emerge. Her work has been reviewed in ArtSpiel, Two Coats of Paint, The New Criterion, The Boston Globe, The Newark Star-Ledger and The New York Times, among others. She received her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from the College of D.A.A.P. at the University of Cincinnati.

Statement

Lately, I have been seeking out spaces that are quiet and allow the rhythms of nature to seep in. I have been drawing during dusk and dawn from the landscape and using these liminal spaces to guide my new paintings. I’m looking at tree-scapes and landmasses but my hand is always veering into the more untethered expressions of the unseen. Aural impressions and compositions that spring from the unconscious collide with the assertion and dissolution of form. I am interested in navigating the visual terrain that veers from exterior to interior and back again.

I approach the work with an energy that is at once meditative and spontaneous. I allow the notational marks to be guided by both intention and surprise. The electric connectivity of the hand and its performative movements has collapsed into a more vibratory sense of light and space. Skeletal forms have become more compacted and a denser, more atmospheric space has emerged. For me, this generative painting process that comes from intimate tracings, that grows and is negated, echoes nature in its form and in its making. I look for light in the work that is anchored to the passing of time both dark and celebratory. I feel the shifting of the seasons and the gravity of being alive.