Biala at Frieze Masters London, 2025
The following essay was written for the occasion of Biala at Frieze Masters London from October 15–19, 2025, at The Regent’s Park, London, Booth S20.
by Mary Gabriel, Author of Ninth Street Women
Biala was once asked during an interview in Paris if she minded being in exhibitions featuring American artists. Her first response was, “Oh, I have no problems about it at all. I don’t care what they think.” But on second thought, she said she did. She wasn’t a “real” American, she said, because she was born in Europe and in any case, “your easel is your country, really—unless you paint on the wall! Wherever my easel is, that’s where I am.”
Those simple sentences, so easy so to ignore amid her smiles and laughter, encapsulate the essence of Biala. She existed between cultures, enriched by and enriching them all. She created her own culture, defying styles and trends, doing exactly what she pleased regardless of what “they”—whether society or the art world—might think about it. “At least I lived the kind of life I wanted to live, and where I wanted to live it,” she said with a shrug.
That life was one of constant movement, but then those were restless times for many artists. In the first half of the century, Americans sailed to Paris to be near the artists who created the Western modernist revolution. In the second half of the century, European artists travelled to New York to meet the new revolutionaries, the Abstract Expressionists and their offspring, who had for the first time in history shifted the focus of the international art world to the United States.
What made Biala unique among that artistic migration was that she wasn’t a mere visitor in either place, in Paris or New York, she was an integral part of those communities where words and pictures were being transformed to suit the times and the temperament of largely unheralded writers and artists.
Being the voracious intellect that she was, Biala absorbed all of those influences. Look closely, and they’re all there on her canvases: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Matisse, Picasso, Soutine, Cézanne, early Willem de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky and, in later years, even Ad Reinhardt. From out of that artistic earthquake, Biala herself emerges in her canvases.
Her strength is her clarity, even in an all-over abstraction. Her presence is undeniable, even in a figureless cityscape. Her personality—so mischievous, so intelligent, so sensual that it robs the viewer of their ability to resist—suffuses her still lifes. She draws you into her quiet observances until you simply must look.
While other artists shout, Biala’s canvases whisper. The story they tell is of a near century-long love affair with art, with the act of creating, with life as an artist. Isn’t it wonderful, then, that through her work Biala has invited us to be part of it.
