Samantha Bittman

StatementCVExhibitions

Samantha Bittman’s work is composed of intricate, meticulous paintings on woven textiles. Bittman creates dazzling surfaces of optically challenging patterns that draw you in to reveal greater depths, dimensionality and unsteadying shifts in perspective. Her bold, patterned paintings elevate the textured visuals of Op Art and geometric abstraction. Painstakingly layering acrylic paint over hand-woven textile, the artist creates intricate lines and shapes that toe the line between flat and three-dimensional surface.

 

Distorting the perception of her viewers, the artist considers her handloom a means through which repetitive numerical data can be processed into visual patterns. There’s an objective, mathematical precision to her pieces, but there’s also aremarkably human warmth –the result, perhaps, of giving in to the parameters created by the loom while also resisting them.

 

Bittman was a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan (2011). She earned a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010), and a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004). Bittman has had a number of solo and two-person exhibitions including Tracey Williams Gallery, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Longhouse Projects, New York; Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn; Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago; and Flash Atölye, Izmir, Turkey. Group shows include Guererro Gallery, San Francisco; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, among others. In 2011 Bittman was awarded a Skowhegan Fellowship and in 2012 received an Artadia Award from the Fund for Art and Dialogue in Chicago. She is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago.