Fox Hysen (1982) graduated from the Yale School of Art in Painting in 2015. She is known for her direct and improvisational practice in which a painterly-imaginary emerges from an interplay of color and form. Her compositionally sophisticated pictures suggest language and figures only to fall short of stability or narrative. The paintings grapple with themselves on a small, anti-heroic scale. Without an explicit or conscious anchor to the observed world or photography, each painting starts with nothing and can be reworked many times. Hysen allows a picture eventually to come into focus on it’s own terms that are discovered in the process of painting. In this way the subject of her work is her own imagination, time, memories of life and painting, artistic values and the unconscious.
Hysen was born in San Rafael, California and grew up in the Bay Area. She currently lives and works in Norfolk, Ct and is full-time faculty at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore. She has had exhibitions at Below Grand and Soloway Gallery in New York and Gallery 16 and Et al. in San Francisco.