Joanne Greenbaum

The best way to introduce Joanne Greenbaum’s abstract paintings is to point the viewer in their direction and send the viewer off. Greenbaum’s marked planes invite engagement while they similarly elicit ease. The works are conversations. In inverse to the preverbal way in which most abstraction is treated historically, Greenbaum’s paintings are a reminder of why great spoken conversations are often deemed ‘art.’

Viscous colors, inked grids, patches of reworked colors and lines, unleash dialogues amongst each other. As with works of modernist theater, which examine both form and narrative, Greenbaum’s paintings take up the fertile territory of being neither consciously one study or the other. The artist altogether skirts the question of form versus narrative and delivers the viewer, via sensorial and pictorial pose-counterpose, into an ether world. A child’s eye peers into the distortions of an aquarium’s walls or is paraded between different outside environments of a zoo; Greenbaum’s compositions contain fascination as well as disembodied other-ness. We are not led to identify with the painting-scape, yet we are continually propelled to consume and pursue it.

In addition to the seven new works on canvas, Joanne Greenbaum presents a collection of her recent artist books. These drawing books operate as record of daily activity, intimate outpourings of the inner life of the artist. Greenbaum furthers her drawing actions with the incorporation of ink and marker into the exuberance of her canvases. The books, taken together with the paintings, reveal the personal extension between daily enterprise and material concerns. Upon each revisit to the individual works of the show, like conversation, they become generative through their many nuances.

Joanne Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Most recently her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Crone Gallery, Berlin, Van Horn Gallery, Dusseldorf, Texas Gallery, Houston, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, greengrassi, London and Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York. Greenbaum’s works have been included in group shows at PS1 MoMA, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Kunsthalle, Basel. In 2008-09 a career-spanning survey of her work was mounted by Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich and travelled to Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany. This is her first exhibition at the gallery.