Edith Baumann

Edith Baumann’s austere, minimalist, abstract paintings are inspired by her decades-long daily meditation practice and her love for jazz, concisely balancing precision with vulnerability, motion, and natural imperfection. Using hand-mulled raw pigment acrylics, Baumann applies thin layers of paint to canvas using small brushes in order to establish a ground of varying depth, and finely-applied lines that hover and span, veil-like, across layered rectilinear fields. As the artist mines the sense of focus, balance, and concentration she achieves in a meditative state, she continues to explore the relationship between color and geometry and the tension between stasis and dynamism.

Art historian and critic Frances Colpitt once said, “In [Baumann’s] paintings, color is radiant, monochromatic fields breathe, and crisp edges quiver almost imperceptibly.” The geometric elements that appear throughout the artist’s works demand exacting structural execution, while the areas of floating, gauze-like color are the product of Baumann’s graceful and unrehearsed freehand.

“When painting, I move back and forth between the positive and negative space intuitively, changing the color – warmer, cooler, etcetera,” Baumann describes. “One area of color informs the other area.” 

Edith Baumann received a B.F.A. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Southern California in 1985. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Beatrix Wilhem Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany), parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA), Newspace (Los Angeles, CA,); and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, (New York, NY); and group gallery and museum exhibitions at Analog Diary (Beacon, NY); Martos Gallery (New York, NY), McClain Gallery (Houston, TX), Hunter Dunbar (New York, NY), Bakersfield Museum of Art (Bakersfield, CA), Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University (Waco, TX). Her work is held in such public institutional collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). Edith Baumann lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.