Finale, a retrospective 1963-2023 of works by Paulien Lethen, artist and director of Holland Tunnel Gallery, is the final exhibition of Holland Tunnel Newburgh. Lethen’s powerful artworks are influenced by the different places where she lived and lives. Each environment has left its mark in her person and work, showing the strength of a woman who created solid ground everywhere, every time, with straightforwardness, humor and no time for nonsense. In Japan she became influenced by ink paintings and the different approach to composition and space. From the Greek island dancing she adapted the firm and fluid movements and translated them into bold lines and round figures. After moving to New York, she worked as a housepainter to support herself and her two sons, scraping old paint of walls and skimming over surfaces. The tools she used as a housepainter became favorite art supplies. In Williamsburg, still a rough and raffled neighborhood when she moved there, abandoned car wrecks along the streets provided her with car hoods that she used as three-dimensional canvases. The earliest work in the exhibition are assemblages made of wood, demantled furniture and other debris found from junk warehouses behind her tiny house, declared uninhabitable, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Lethen’s current work are paintings with bold strokes of high gloss industrial paint, applied with skimming knives and big brushes on refined mulberry paper.

www.paulienlethen.com