Lisa Pressman is a New Jersey–based visual artist and educator whose abstract paintings explore memory, materiality, and transformation. Working across encaustic, oil, cold wax, and mixed media, she layers and manipulates surfaces through scraping, burning, stitching, and mark-making. Her luminous colors, gestural energy, and excavated textures reflect themes of impermanence, grief, and the passage of time.

Since the loss of her son in 2019, Pressman’s processes—burning, sewing, layering—have become deeply tied to mourning and memory. Each painting invites close observation, revealing symbolic marks and traces of language that evoke both presence and absence, like contemporary artifacts infused with personal ritual.

Pressman earned her MFA from Bard College and BA from Douglass College, Rutgers University. She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows across the U.S. and abroad, with work in corporate and private collections including Hyatt Regency, McKinsey Financial, and Omni Hotels. A sought-after educator, she teaches nationally and internationally and has been featured in Cold Wax Medium, Huffington Post, Art Speak, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Shape of Memory is an ongoing body of work that explores how memory takes form—imperfect, layered, and constantly shifting. Working with materials like cardboard, painted and printed papers, thread, and smoke, I build compositions that are sewn, wrapped, scorched, and shaped into hybrid forms. These are not traditional paintings, but constructions—objects that embody both image and surface, fragility and resilience.

My process is guided by layering: one gesture, material, or mark leading to the next. I paint and print papers, tear and reassemble them, add and obscure. The forms that emerge often reference manuscripts, pages, vessels—structures that hold, carry, or preserve. I’m interested in how the physicality of these materials can mirror the layered nature of memory itself: stitched together, unfinished, and always in flux.

Edges become important—burned, sealed, softened—as do seams and scars. These works invite close attention, asking the viewer to sense the history embedded within them, not as narrative, but as presence. Memory here is tactile, embodied, and abstract—less about what happened than how it feels to remember.

LP 2025