Joan Snyder: ComeClose and Anke Weyer: Nocturnes are on view January 12 through February 24 at 60 and 61 Lispenard, respectively.
ComeClose features new paintings by Joan Snyder that glow with intense feeling and color. The shapes, marks, and images in ComeClose are distilled from decades of dedicated studio work. The paintings are not easy to categorize, containing lush allusions to nature, complex formal strategies, and a unique painterly lexicon. Snyder first gained public attention in the early 1970s with her gestural and elegant "stroke paintings", which used the grid to deconstruct and retell the story of abstract painting. By the mid1970s she began to incorporate symbols and text, as the paintings took on a more complex materiality. She is often referred to as an autobiographical or confessional artist; her paintings are essentially narratives of both personal and communal experiences. Nature and the landscape have always been another strong focus of her work. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired generations of emerging artists. Snyder is represented in numerous museum collections, including Art Institute of Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard Art Museums; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art.
Anke Weyer makes boldly expressive, large-scale oil and acrylic canvases that materialize an embodied and improvisational painting process. Utilizing a wide palette of bold hues, the artist creates lively, buzzing colorscapes. Her works tackle histories and practices of expressionistic gesture while ultimately shirking a didactic stance on painting’s value, instead insisting on the open-endedness of the work’s potential interpretations. Weyer enacts an intense and hyper focused engagement with her materials. In Nocturnes, Weyer continues to index a highly physicalized painting practice that results in vividly colored compositions full of overlapping squiggles, daubs, washes, and drips. In her bustling canvases, Weyer embraces improvisation, adding and scraping away pigment in a spontaneous and instinctive process.
WM