Casterline|Goodman Gallery Introduces Lisa Kinzelberg

Casterline|Goodman Gallery is pleased to introduce Lisa Kinzelberg, a visual artist whose richly layered abstract paintings chart an emotional and experiential relationship to place. Best known for her ongoing series Cities of the World, Kinzelberg creates works that exist at the intersection of abstraction, cartography, and memory—paintings that function as both aerial views and psychological portraits.

Kinzelberg’s practice begins not with geography, but with feeling. Each work emerges from a densely worked abstract underpainting built through layers of oil, texture, and gesture. These foundational strata are intuitive and atmospheric, capturing the rhythm, pace, and emotional tenor of a city as it is experienced rather than seen. Only after this abstract ground is established does Kinzelberg introduce the structural elements of mapping: roads, waterways, coastlines, and landmarks that slowly crystallize into a recognizable urban form.

The resulting paintings hover in a productive tension. From a distance, the viewer may recognize the familiar contours of a city—New York, Paris, Tokyo—yet up close, the work resists fixed interpretation. Streets dissolve into color fields, neighborhoods pulse with energy, and the logic of the map gives way to something more human and subjective. Kinzelberg’s cities are not documents; they are lived spaces, shaped as much by memory, movement, and emotion as by physical infrastructure.

At the core of Cities of the World is Kinzelberg’s belief in ambiguity as a generative force. Rather than prescribing a single narrative, her paintings invite viewers to project their own experiences onto the surface. A familiar city may trigger nostalgia or longing; an unfamiliar one may evoke curiosity or imagined connection. In this way, the work becomes participatory, reflecting the shared human experience of travel, migration, and belonging.

This sensibility aligns closely with Casterline|Goodman Gallery’s commitment to artists who engage abstraction as a means of exploring perception, history, and lived experience. Kinzelberg’s work speaks to both contemporary abstraction and a longer tradition of mapping as a way of understanding the world—bridging the analytical and the emotional, the personal and the universal.

Kinzelberg’s paintings also resonate in the current cultural moment, as cities continue to function as sites of convergence and transformation. Her work acknowledges the complexity of urban life: its density and dissonance, its beauty and impermanence. By reimagining maps as expressive surfaces, she challenges the notion of place as fixed, instead presenting it as something fluid, layered, and deeply subjective.

Casterline|Goodman Gallery is proud to represent Lisa Kinzelberg and to support the continued evolution of a practice that redefines how we see—and feel—the places that shape us. For consideration of available works, please email gallery@casterlinegoodman.com.