From the perspective of many luminaries in the art-critical establishment of yore, the pluralistic 1970s was the decade that went wrong. The messy dismantling of modernism then taking place was tantamount to patricide and shattered the idea of cohesive movements in art. Many lamented the seeming lack of direction, noting the death of painting as another grim marker of decline. Calvin Tomkins went so far as to declare that no major artists emerged in America during those so-called deplorable years. Robert Motherwell proclaimed his fellow Abstract Expressionists the last artists to make substantial contributions to history, while dismissing the next wave as being capable of nothing more than producing the occasional footnote.

Shared by CANADA Gallery in concurrent with their solo exhibition:

"The Summer Becomes a Room"

Joan Snyder

September 2 - October 10, 2020

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.

There is a hieroglyph in the Egyptian alphabet that is a representation of a pool with lotuses: the pictograph is a horizontal rectangle with a few stylized flowers and buds emerging from its top surface. There is something comforting about this cool little pool, the idea that it was part of a visual language, appearing in a text here and there, offering a phonetic component (“sha”) to words, but also reminding the reader of a place where they might seek refuge. 

Painters Reply, curated by Alex Glauber and Alex Logsdail, aims to answer the Artforum questionnaire through an exploration of experimental painting practices starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present moment. The selected artists reveal how the pervasive antipathy towards painting perhaps afforded a greater degree of latitude whereby materiality, application, atypical support, performative impulse and format were all of a sudden in play. The exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists, including some of those published in Artforum’s responses to the questionnaire such as Joan Snyder and Dona Nelson, where the common denominator is aesthetic emancipation.

Franklin Parrasch Gallery presents Mulberry and Canal, an exhibition which examines the early years of the careers of Joan Snyder, Keith Sonnier, and Jackie Winsor, with a particular focus on the period between 1967 and 1975 when the three lived together in a converted multi-story warehouse at 105 Mulberry Street, near Canal Street in lower Manhattan.

Blain|Southern is delighted to announce Rosebuds & Rivers, Joan Snyder’s (b. 1940, New Jersey, US) first solo exhibition in the UK. Comprising new and recent paintings, the exhibition will include a group of monumental triptychs and diptychs alongside smaller-scale works. It offers an insight into the experimentation and visual language for which Snyder is celebrated.

My mother has spoken about being at an altar when she paints. “It is the altar I go to face myself.” And “Art,” she says, “became a form of worship. Those were my shrines,” speaking about her altar paintings made in the mid-sixties. 5 Her work is her self-created spirituality. It is her calling. She reaches new levels of comprehension about the meaning of life by throwing down herbs upon canvas, awash with glossy green paint and golden glitter. In the 1960s, when “the personal is political” became a rallying cry, my mother was in step with the times. Her early altar paintings from that decade were abstracted versions of the female body, and she would often add tacky materials like gold fringe or fake leopard skin.