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Hetty Baiz
Hetty Baiz is an American artist who creates paintings characterized by rich textural surfaces. and interwoven layers of image, color and material. Made from complex processes that can include digital manipulation, printing, weaving, painting, drawing and burning with a torch, the final images -- life size figures and larger than life faces -- are literally built into the material. They appear to be fading into the rugged surface, or perhaps emerging from it, and the identity of the subject is absorbed into the materiality. Open ended questions about transience and the nature of being – of identity, mortality, and time, are intrinsic to her work.
Baiz has been painting since early childhood. Her first teacher was her mother, an abstract expressionist painter and student of Hans Hofmann. She went on to major in art at Bard College and received a BFA from Cornell University where she studied with Friedal Dzubus. Awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she worked there with Robert Goodnough, Jacob Lawrence and James Weeks.
Baiz has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Selected for the Incheon Women Artists Biennale in South Korea, she has taken part in collaborative art projects in China, Tibet, Dubai, Australia and France.
Baiz has taught art with an NGO that supports underserved women in the informal settlements outside of Cape Town, South Africa. It was during this experience that she learned how to weave using the techniques of the resident women weavers. This has resulted in her latest body of work, woven portraits.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Hetty Baiz’s ambiguous portraits of unnamed people are taken from old photographs, and are made by weaving together printed paper and jute into small squares that, when assembled into a grid on canvas, form the total image. Oil pastel, ink, paint, gold leaf are rubbed or splattered onto the surface further obscuring the identity of the subject and emphasizing the heavily textured physical properties of the object. The portraits appear to be fading into the rugged surface, or perhaps emerging from it, and the identity of the subject is absorbed into the rich materiality. Each face seems to be in a state of flux, in an undifferentiated landscape, a shifting sea of open questions - about identity, and mortality, and time – examining the transient nature of place, our place, in the world and the fragility of our human existence.