Hetty Baiz 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 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 painted since early childhood and was greatly influenced by her mother, Elizabeth Baiz, also an artist and student of Hans Hofmann. Art making was an integral part of her family life growing up in northeastern PA. She continued her art studies at Bard College and received degrees from Cornell and Columbia universities as well as a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Baiz has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and her work is held in many private and public collections. 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. Teaching art to underserved women at an NGO outside of Cape Town, South Africa introduced her to weaving, a technique that she now incorporates into her latest body of work. Baiz is represented by Calloway Fine Art, Washington, DC. She lives and works in Princeton, NJ and northeastern PA.
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