JULIE ANDERSON MATHIAS

​AMERICAN, B. 1950

Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Julie Anderson Mathias creates large-scale abstract paintings in which color, structure, and spatial relationships are brought into constant dialogue. Her distinctive approach has been shaped by an unusual combination of disciplines: an early fascination with building and spatial design, formal training in interior architecture, decades of experience as a muralist, and a sustained practice as a painter.

While studying interior architecture at Syracuse University in the early 1970s, Anderson Mathias encountered the work of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters, including Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. Their radical approaches to color and composition left a lasting impression and continue to inform her work today.

After graduating, she founded a mural company and began working on a monumental scale. Painting directly on buildings required her to translate smaller compositions into vast architectural spaces, using scaffolding, grids, and modular planning to organize complex surfaces. These methods became an important part of her visual language and continue to influence the way she constructs her paintings.

Her later career as an interior architect, including her work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, further developed her understanding of scale, proportion, structure, and the experience of space. These architectural sensibilities remain visible in her paintings, where geometric frameworks provide an underlying sense of order while color introduces movement, tension, and emotion. Anderson Mathias typically begins each work with sketches, color studies, and carefully considered geometric structures. Yet the finished painting often moves beyond the parameters of the original plan. The process becomes a negotiation between intention and discovery, structure and intuition. For her, however, color remains at the center of everything.

“Color is always the subject matter of my work. No matter who we are or where we live, we make color decisions every day. That is part of the art of being human.”