Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present An Abundance of Errors, Linda Besemer’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is comprised of Besemer’s “glitch” paintings, presented for the first time.

The configuration of each painting is derived from a process of digital manipulation. The artist begins by composing on the computer, openly allowing for glitches. Moments of slippage, failure, and experimentation occur allowing for the creation of a spatial logic that not only breaks down the Cartesian perspective but also challenges the notion of technological perfection. The digital compositions are then hand-painted into picture planes of visual reverberation and dematerialized worlds of tension and dissolution. Besemer uses this approach to paint something new, something invented; open up new possibilities, and in the artist’s words “to abstract the abstract.”

At first glance, the works appear to be made purely through a digital means, perhaps printed, but upon closer examination, Besemer’s brushwork reveals their intensely handmade quality. In the glitch paintings, Besemer fashions a manner that defies the flat plane of the canvas and transforms the meaning of pictorial space. The final result of Besemer’s methodology and technique is a series of mind-bending abstractions with a retro-futuristic presence of West Coast gradients and stunning dimensionality.

Besemer’s work in abstraction has long been an exercise in philosophically upending the meaning of painting — prompting the viewer to enter a space beyond our normative perceptions. Large-scale, mid-sized canvases and smaller paintings combine to evoke an atmospheric narrative of precision and collapse — where the theoretical and the experiential come together as an invitation to traverse a matrix of unbound complexity, where beauty and unruliness coexist.

Linda Besemer was born in 1957 in South Bend, Indiana. She received a BFA at Indiana University in 1981 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia in 1983. Besemer’s paintings have been featured in numerous museums, most notably: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Museum of Contemporary Art, SITE Sante Fe, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, The Albright Knox Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art and The Palm Beach ICA. Her works can be found in such institutions as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Albright-Knox Museum of Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and others. Besemer is the James Irvine Distinguished Professor of the Arts at Occidental College where she has taught painting and drawing since 1987.