Lisa Petker Mintz "Fly Away"

Lisa Petker Mintz is a graduate of Parsons School of Design whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the East Coast, with recent expansion to Texas. Her solo exhibition Impulse and Improv at The Painting Center in Chelsea marked a significant evolution in her work, followed by Repetition and Ritual at Hood College Gallery, which further explored rhythm, accumulation, and embodied mark-making.
She has exhibited at Islip Art Museum alongside artists including Helen Frankenthaler and Elizabeth Murray and has received multiple grants, including a $10,000 award from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Creative Individual Grant from the Huntington Arts Council. Her work was recently featured among the Top 4 highlighted works in Curators’ Picks: Women-Led Galleries Now on Artsy.
Petker Mintz was commissioned by NYU Langone Health to create seven paintings for the Spatz Postpartum Unit and is currently expanding her practice into large scale work through 9 foot by 36 foot commission. She has participated in a residency at M. David & Co. in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She currently serves as President of The Painting Center in New York.
Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition titled Emergent Light at Adelphi University, on view June 2 through August 2, with an opening on June 3, as well as a presentation at Future Fair. Petker Mintz will also be in a group show titled In Full Bloom at Untitled Space at 45 Lispenard Street in Tribeca.

Artist Statement:

"These paintings begin with the structure of maps, systems meant to guide, organize, and offer a sense of direction. I use this underlying framework as a point of departure, building it up through layers of pours, marks, and embedded patterns, then breaking it apart through scraping, erasure, and reconfiguration. What remains is a terrain that can no longer be read in a fixed way. Routes dissolve, intersections collapse, and the idea of orientation becomes fluid, open, and unresolved.
Floral elements move through these disrupted systems, not as decoration but as active participants in the composition. They interrupt, soften, and sometimes overtake the structure, introducing moments of growth, fragility, and excess. At times they feel anchored, at others they drift, creating a tension between what is held in place and what is in motion. Their presence shifts the rhythm of the surface, offering points of recognition while also complicating the space.
Color and atmosphere carry the work forward. Saturated passages push against areas of air and openness, allowing the paintings to oscillate between density and release. Decisions are often made at the edge, where the work risks over resolving or collapsing, so that energy can remain active rather than fixed. The process is one of accumulation rather than correction, with earlier decisions remaining visible and embedded within the surface.
These works are not about finding a clear path, but about staying inside the complexity of not knowing. They explore how systems break down, how beauty can emerge from disruption, and how moments of clarity can exist without resolving the whole."