Julian Lethbridge

Artist biography:

Born: 1947, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Lethbridge was educated at Winchester College and Cambridge University in England.

Upon graduation, Lethbridge began a career as a banker, but by 1972 had moved to New York to paint and draw. His first exhibition of paintings and drawings at Julian Pretto Gallery (1988) was followed within the next year by one-person exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Daniel Weinberg Gallery in San Francisco.

In 1998, he became an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art at Columbia University. Additionally, in 1999 and 2001 Lethbridge served as visiting lecturer on Visual and Environment Studies at Harvard University, where he continues to lecture on occasion.

Lethbridge's abstraction is cerebral, often based on mathematical or natural principles. Methodically building up his surfaces with pigment, he then incises them with repeated patterns. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Lethbridge limited his work to shades of black and white, mining the richness of monochromatic painting. More recently he has begun to introduce vibrant colors and more gestural brushwork into his paintings. Lethbridge began printing at ULAE in 1989.

His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Tate Gallery (London), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), and The National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.). In 1988, Julian Lethbridge was awarded the Francis J. Greenberger Award.