Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Drawings: 2007 - 2017, a survey show featuring lyrical works on paper produced in the decade between 2007 – 2017 by New York-based artist Joanne Greenbaum. The exhibition will be on view at Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels Annex from October 15 - November 12, 2022.
Drawing is a central pillar of the artist’s work, occupying a position as important as – and foundational to – her painting. Greenbaum draws constantly, and through that physical, meditative, and hermetic work, develops visual idioms centered on form and color that evolve over the course of many iterations. For instance, a series of ball-point pen drawings – a mainstay of her career – represent layered, heavy geometric forms budding amid tangles of looping, lighter-toned scribbles. Despite their similarities, the impressions left by the formal structure of each work change significantly. At times, the forms resemble abstracted architectural plans or urban topographies, and at others, they resemble the hazy shapeliness of paintings by Orphists such as Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia.
Congestion and space, order and chaos, color and blankness have been central tensions animating Greenbaum’s frenetic, lively works for three decades. The irreverence of graffiti, the meandering quality of doodles, the psychological charge of handwriting, and the spatial awareness of blueprinting are all invoked across Greenbaum’s vibrant,and challenging works.
Greenbaum employs a panoply of materials to create her drawings, from ball-point pen and archival marker to colored pencil, gouache, and watercolor. As John Yau put it in Hyperallergic: “In contrast to many of her contemporaries who have established a set of constraints within which to work – and this can be a grid, choice of colors, size of the canvas, or even subject matter – Greenbaum seems intent on leaving no avenue unexplored.”
Reflecting on her drawings, Greenbaum writes: “I enjoyed thinking of [the drawings] as very living things that were recording my thoughts as the days went on […] I am always working on a few at a time in different materials, such as the watercolor, which is meditative and slow, or the sumi ink, which is fast and watery. Sometimes no thought goes into the drawings – they are just energy being recorded. For me, drawing is thinking, and thinking is drawing.”
Joanne Greenbaum (b. 1953, New York, NY; lives and works in New York) earned a BA from Bard College. Greenbaum is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including The Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; Artist in Residence at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant. Greenbaum has exhibited internationally including at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kusthalle Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, DE; and MoMA PS1, New York, NY; among many others. She has also been the subject of two major retrospectives of her work, one presented at the Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany; and the other at The Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is included in the collections of the Brandeis Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; CCA Andratx, Majorca, ES; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich, CH; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and the Ross Art Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.