Joan Waltemath

Hionas Gallery is pleased to present One does not negate the other, the latest solo exhibition from abstract painter Joan Waltemath. This show, Waltemath’s first solo venture with the gallery, is comprised of recent works from the artist’s Torso/Roots paintings series along with classic paintings from the early 2000s. She previously had work included in the gallery’s group show Between Levels in 2014.

For One does not negate the other, it’s as if Waltemath has deconstructed a golden section and placed its disparate forms into a stratum of her choosing. While Waltemath relays mathematical and architectural qualities in her work, reminiscent of El Lissitzky’s fantastical Prouns, the compositions derive their dimensions from the human form. Harmonic proportions are carefully maintained so that asymmetry and balance can co-exist.

Waltemath’s paintings adeptly conflate architectonic and painterly languages into grid-based compositions, yielding minimalist works that don’t forego evidence of the artist’s touch. Line, form, and color define every inch of each work, and yet, Waltemath creates immense depth at select points on her panels through the application of unique oil and pigment pairings, mixing in zinc, malachite, hematite, dolomite, phosphorescent, and dozens more. This willful engagement of medium purity is what lends each work its permanence, layering and embedding viscous mixtures that take months, and in some instances years to fully set.

The heterogeneous qualities of Waltemath’s work are revelatory, illustrated best by the convergence of art and architecture as well as her talent for building a distinct syntax from those vocabularies. Buildings can take years to be completed, from sketch to design, followed by groundbreaking, construction, topping out and furnishing. The human body, likewise, takes years to develop and mature. It is no accident that Waltemath follows a very similar script and timetable when creating each painting.

Joan Waltemath has lived in New York City since the late 1970s. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Baltimore, Portland, London, Basel, and Cologne, among other cities, and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, among others. She has written extensively on art and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Brooklyn Rail and Contributing Editor for artcritical.com. She taught at the IS Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, from 1997 to 2010, and periodically at Princeton University starting in 2000 until 2010, when she was appointed Director of MICA’s L.E. Hoffberger School of Painting in Baltimore, MD. She was named a Creative Capital grantee in 2012.