American, b. 1949
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Kauai, Hawaii

Tom Lieber is an abstract painter and printmaker. His large-scale abstractions are notable for their bold, natural colors and fluid marks placed against a layered, neutral background. Informed by nature and meditations, Lieber’s work reflects his efforts to channel his interior life onto the canvas.

Often a single brushstroke or gesture anchors Lieber’s paintings, allowing the underlying color fields and tonal variations to recede and advance across the ground. Calligraphic mark-making, the supple flow and arc of his line, and the dynamic rhythm of his abstract compositions are all signatures of Lieber’s style. He treats the act of painting as a full-body experience, open to unpredictable and challenging imagery.

The grace and shape of Lieber’s bold lines appear over subtle neutral backgrounds with pockets of dense color and movement. Lieber’s new, large canvases, thick with paint, can evoke a reference to Joan Mitchell in the foreground mark-making, at the same time the nuanced color variation in the backgrounds leave a suggestion of Mark Rothko. While these visual influences are present, the work and the energy that it emits can be no other than Tom Lieber. Often a single brushstroke or gesture anchors the painting, allowing the underlying color fields and tonal variations to recede and advance across the ground.

Lieber’s environments influence his works to an autobiographical degree despite the non representational quality of his work. Informed by nature and meditations, Lieber believes that the body can be better equipped for inventing than the mind, treating the act of painting as a full body experience.

Since the mid-1980s, Tom Lieber's work has been shown and celebrated internationally. Lieber’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Tate Gallery, London; and numerous other art museums.