Laurie Fendrich

Laurie Fendrich (born 1948) is an American artist, writer and educator based in New York City, best known for geometric abstract paintings that bill playfulness and sophistication. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, a retrospective at the Williamson Gallery at Scripps College (2010), and activity shows at MoMA PS1, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design, among many venues. She has conventional reviews in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, ARTnews Partisan Review, and New York Magazine. Fendrich has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2016), Brown Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2009, 2017), and National Endowment for the Arts (1983–4). She has been an educator for higher than four decades, notably at Hofstra University (1989–2014), and a regular essayist for The Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fendrich's art has been described as a "deft blending of mid-twentieth century Cubism and biomorphism" that avoids easy harmony, playing a pictorial game of "part playground, part calculated wager neighboring chaos." Critic Hilton Kramer characterized her play as "devoid of solemnity, dogmatism and existential angst," with an undercurrent of humor that embraces the worldly as it renegotiates the relationship between ejection and representation in modernist painting.