Joanne Greenbaum

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present our first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Joanne Greenbaum, Scaffold. The show features 8 new paintings including one of her largest works to date.

Joanne Greenbaum’s paintings consistently feature the layering of forms, both painting and drawing, in a pictorial space, thus creating uniquely intuitive compositions distinctly her own. As the artist recently stated:

My work always has an underlying structure, and the paintings in particular consist of a scaffold system. I’ve long been attracted to a fictional structure – one that doesn’t necessarily correspond with architecture. It’s a way to “hang” a painting onto something. But in addition to the scaffolding, there is also an idea that is more metaphysical and emotional. I think in this body of work I am relying less on pictorial devices and more on energy and movement. The scaffold is a kind of place to put all these ideas together in a way that allows me to indulge my love of form and color together with a physical presence.

Joanne Greenbaum’s work is distinguished through her desire for continual reinvention which serves as the motivating force behind her distinctive and immediately recognizable paintings, works on paper and ceramics. Often using drawing as the springboard for her paintings, Greenbaum formulates a relationship between the two approaches which ultimately reflects her own unique vocabulary of line and volume.

Joanne Greenbaum (b. 1953, New York) earned a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Over the past twenty years, Joanne Greenbaum has exhibited widely at international venues including at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany; and MoMA PS1, New York, among many others. In 2008, a career-spanning survey of her work was mounted by Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland and travelled to the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany. In 2018, the Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted “Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today,” a comprehensive solo exhibition that travelled to the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.