Nancy Haynes

"The rooms opened to another shore

between the waves of night,

where darkness ever folds itself

within the waves of light."

—Betty Parsons’s poem on the occasion of an Ad Reinhardt exhibition.

Marlborough London is delighted to present Nancy Haynes: Dialectics of Silence, the American painter’s inaugural exhibition in the United Kingdom.

The exhibition features a selection of Haynes’s book-sized paintings from the series – library, dedicated to a pantheon of writers, important to the artist. In this series of works, Haynes approaches each intimately scaled linen canvas with painterly and meticulous manipulation of depth, light, and gradation, inviting viewers on an introspective journey into the illusive and inevitable nature of transience. Conceived within the parameters of a limited palette and absorbed into the muted surface, Haynes creates the sensation of an impermanence of time—a blurred sfumato of unfolded layers, an abyss in which all colors are mixed, but light is withdrawn, and a depth, as artist Cameron Martin describes, where “time is inhabited, animated and lived.” Along the edges of the paintings, Haynes paints the loose and interrupted perimeters, deconstructing the viewer’s preconception of composition and presenting them with a structural roadmap to investigate the relationships with the material surface, pictorial space, and conceptual, contemplative silence. Rather than directly translating her literary source material into the visual sphere, Haynes distills her memory of it, unifying moments from the present ‘here,’ as illustrated on the linen, and the distant ‘there.’ As Haynes says, the paintings are “non-representational, non-objective, conceptual.”

Nancy Haynes, arrived in New York City in the late 1960s during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement when other burgeoning artist were conducting experiments in Minimal and Conceptual Art. Being exposed to an older generation of artists such as Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) and Agnes Martin (1912-2004), Haynes embarked on developing a unique style that aimed to investigate light’s role in abstraction. Haynes dedicated herself to using black, in particular, lamp black, and sometimes experimented with luminous paint, gold leaf, slate, and copper. Marjorie Welish describes the color black as having both “utopia aspirations” and the “solemnity of the tabula rasa.” At first, Haynes’s surfaces seem cerebral and void; however, through her mastery of subtle yet gestural gradations of light, one can slowly unfold their layers of meanings, depths, and spaces. The palimpsests hover somewhere between the sensuous facture embedded in oil painting and the anonymity of the shallow screens of our contemporary experience with media. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe phrases it in his article “video’s thin brightness,” the black-dominated surface, with brushes of light sleeking from the edges, resembles the black screens we encounter every moment in our interactions with technology—images that are being emerged and vanished collage on the surface altogether.

Nancy Haynes was born in 1947, in Connecticut. She has held numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions and galleries, including in Basel, Munich, Vienna, Brussels, Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles. Her paintings and works on paper may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; The Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; the Hammer Museum, California; Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut; Gemeentemuseum, The Netherlands; the Albertina Museum of Art, Vienna, amongst many others.