LONDON.- Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery shared that American artist Joan Snyder has joined the gallery, representing her in Europe and Asia in collaboration with Canada gallery in the US. Her first solo exhibition with Thaddaeus Ropac will take place in November 2024 at the London gallery. Joan Snyder's paintings are currently on view in the group presentation Painterly Gestures at Tate Modern, London and in Making Their Mark, an exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani at the Shah Garg Foundation, New York.
For six decades Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction through her paintings, drawings and printmaking. Her works are held in major institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London, among others.
Joan Snyder's important contribution to the field of American abstraction from the 1970s onwards is distinguished by her intuition for fearless mark making and composition. The unmistakable qualities of her painterly gesture forcefully communicate the joys, pains and beauty of being alive in the world. Her practice over the course of nearly six decades has remained steadfast to a deeply felt truth. — Thaddaeus Ropac
Fuelling abstraction with biography, Joan Snyder consciously works against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged in the 1970s. Building a vocabulary of recurring personal motifs – from roses and breasts, to ponds and mud, totems, screaming faces, grapes, scrawled words, cherry trees and moons, pumpkins and sunflowers – she pushes the formal possibilities of paint while developing a complex materiality through an additive process of collaged materials.
Joan Snyder’s oeuvre is structured around three main groups of work: the Stroke paintings, Symphony paintings and Field paintings. While the Stroke paintings explore the ‘anatomy of a painting’ through brightly coloured bars that dance across her canvases, the Symphony paintings assert the fundamental influence of music in her artmaking. In turn, uniting the thematic with the formal and symbolic, her Field paintings depict the agricultural landscapes she encountered upon relocating from New York to more rural surroundings in the mid-1980s. Her all-over treatment of the canvas establishes a creative field in which she sows her imagery, colours and gestures to fuse formal experimentation with ideas of mythical and personal cyclical renewal.
Joan Snyder’s paintings create a field that implies we are in the landscape rather than apart from it... Both abstract and representational. Both pretty and aggressive. Both layered and flat. Both composed and improvisational. Both observational and invented. An instance of a human consciousness, trying to make sense of itself in the world. — Helen Molesworth
