Joanne Greenbaum

In her paintings, New York artist Joanne Greenbaum merges the traditional vocabulary of abstract painting (graphic-painting, expressive-constructive, hard-soft, light-dark, front-back, etc.) into new, unusual visual experiences in a refreshingly undogmatic and playful way. She generates images that balance the formal opposites in a momentary trance-like state of suspension. At the same time, her paintings confidently invite the viewer to a processual exploration of an anarchically proliferating pictorial world that seems potentially inexhaustible in its astonishing capacity for self-transformation and self-renewal.

It is no coincidence that Greenbaum's paintings always remind one of large drawings. Greenbaum is a tireless draftswoman. Not a day goes by without her writing down spontaneous ideas in a sketchbook that she always carries with her.

The works on paper, however, represent a different type of drawing. They are independent, pictorial drawings with which Greenbaum explores the development potential of her visual language, mostly in serial arrangements.



Martin Schwander