D’Amelio Terras, New York
March 31 – April 28, 2001
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present its third exhibition of Joanne Greenbaum’s paintings.
Over the past ten years, Greenbaum has worked to push beyond what she feels is an exhausted language of abstraction. Using thin lines of translucent oil paint, the artist places animated circles, spirals, lines and blocks of color directly on the canvas. These bare compositions undermine the sense of gravity associated with the history of painting, prompting a feeling of doubt in the viewer. The contrast between Greenbaum’s resolutely flat marks and the performing spaces they create also gives her paintings a sense of vertigo. Bice Curiger, a curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus, described Greenbaum’s paintings in Phaidon’s recent publication Fresh Cream:
The space of the picture always seems to be swaying slightly, stretching itself, vibrating, as if it were on the edge of tipping over or opening up. Memories from the real world and allusions to the abstract from domains other than art, like diagrams, ornaments, fragments of architecture, planning sketches, etc., are a challenge to the observer’s perception…. This is painting beyond elegant gesticulation; it does not revel in the material, in oily unctuousness, nor in the possibilities of colour’s self-absorption, [and contains] all the seriousness of such an approach.
Joanne Greenbaum lives and works in New York. This month she will also have a two-person show with Mary Heilmann at greengrassi in London.
