For six decades American artist Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction through her paintings, drawings and prints. She first garnered widespread recognition in the early 1970s with her Stroke paintings that dissect the most fundamental of painterly gestures: the brushstroke. Fuelling abstraction with autobiography, she consciously worked 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. ‘I wanted more in painting, not less,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell a story, have a beginning, a middle, an end... to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex.’ 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. Snyder’s rigorous interrogation of abstraction is underpinned by her feminist outlook, as she centres ‘the essence of feelings of a female body’ to carve out new terrain in contemporary American painting.

Love from an Abstract Artist is an exhibition spanning over six decades of American artist Joan Snyder’s work on paper. Featuring nearly 50 new and historical works, dating from the mid-1960s to the present day, it bears witness to the important position drawing has always held in Snyder’s practice. Often diaristic and autobiographical, these varied works encompass Snyder’s grids, symbols, landscapes and strokes, and incorporate collaged materials including fabric, rope, berries, herbs and hand-pressed paper pulp, among others. Snyder has continually expanded the possibilities of drawing. Her works on paper are, as the American critic and art historian Faye Hirsch writes, ‘independent and self-sufficient objects’.

Snyder is recognised for developing a new, distinctly embodied language of abstract painting at a time when legacies of Abstract Expressionism loomed large and Minimalism espoused new conditions of sterility and mechanical facture in American art. In this male-dominated climate, she dissected the ‘anatomy’ of painting to its constituent parts and, in the mid-1970s, began adding personal motifs to her work such as bodies and breasts, vulvas and hearts, totems and fields of flowers. ‘It seemed to me that in order to go forward, I had to push back hard,’ she reflects. ‘To again embrace ideas that were at the very foundation of all my thinking about painting – about structure, about application, about meaning, about materials.’ The earliest works in the exhibition including Stripes/Mounds and Green Strokes (both 1968) reveal how drawing offered the artist a framework, outside of painting, through which to deconstruct its most fundamental elements. ‘My drawings are the skeletons upon which I plan to add muscle and bones and flesh,’ she has said. Presenting a series of reduced marks – blobs, lines, stripes and strokes – these works contain the pictorial discoveries that would catalyse one of the artist’s major bodies of work, the Stroke paintings.

Joan Snyder: Love from an Abstract Artist at Thaddaeus Ropac, runs til 4 October 2025: https://ropac.net/online-exhibitions/210-joan-snyder-love-from-an-abstract-artist/

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