Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Amnesia, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with New York based artist Joanne Greenbaum. Through paintings and sculptures spanning from 2000 through 2025, Amnesia showcases the artist’s dynamic, bold, and ever-changing approach to abstraction. An essay written by Jay Gorney was commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition.
I’ve always admired and been slightly in awe of those painters who stand in front of a blank canvas and attempt to reinvent the wheel–to create an entirely new take on their own pictorial language with each painting. Joanne Greenbaum is one of those artists, so it’s not surprising that she chose to call this exhibition Amnesia, a fair description of that moment when she deliberately forgets everything and faces a new painting with an open and receptive mind.
I talked to Joanne about her choice of title. “When I start to work, I always seem to forget what I’ve done before.” Although a sort of painterly muscle memory kicks in, she tries to rid her mind of pre-conceived ideas as she begins a new work. Facing the blank canvas, then, the “beginner’s mind” meets the experienced hand, letting each new painting feel both surprisingly free and unmistakably hers. Greenbaum’s paintings juggle flamboyant curvilinear forms with structural angular shapes, areas of drawing with richly painted surfaces. There is enormous variation of density and openness, lightness and weight both within each work and from painting to painting. Although her forms often have a distinctly architectural feeling (a previous exhibition was called Scaffold), Greenbaum is clear about the fact that her vocabulary is not rooted in representation. She displays an unerring sense of compositional rightness as she deploys diverse mediums and approaches within each painting.
The works included in Amnesia span roughly a decade and display the extent of the artist’s bravura and range. I’m newly struck by the elegance of a 2019 canvas, in which a jagged black diagonal bisects a pale canvas covered with lightly drawn curlicues and lines. This beautifully composed abstract painting balances both with rigor and delicacy. I can’t help but compare this work with a dark painting from 2013, in which a large, aggressively rendered pink and blue form stretches across the nocturnal canvas. Here, Greenbaum’s quickly drawn lines seem etched into the black ground. The same highly personal vocabulary of jagged shapes and quickly drawn curves is completely transformed as she creates a radically different sort of work. It’s satisfying to see Joanne Greenbaum’s own deft take on the weighty, often ponderous history of abstract painting as she creates beautiful, intelligent works with her own lighter, highly personal language.
Jay Gorney
November, 2025
Joanne Greenbaum (b. New York, NY, US; lives and works in New York, NY, US) earned a BA from Bard College in 1975. 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 Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; 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.
Jay Gorney (b. 1952; lives and works in New York, NY) graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Art History in 1973. Gorney founded and ran Jay Gorney Modern art in New York city from 1985 through 1998, and represented artists such as Martha Rosler, James Welling, Gillian Wearing, Haim Steinbach, Jessica Stockholder, Catherine Opie, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Bloom, Allen Ruppersberg, and others. In 1999, Gorney formed Gorney Bravin + Lee with John Lee and Karin Bravin, and showed many artists represented by Jay Gorney Modern Art alongside artists such as Dawoud Bey, James Siena, and Justine Kurland through 2005. From 2005 to 2013, Gorney was the Director of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s contemporary program. Between 2017 and 2019, Gorney was a Director at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. Gorney has also worked as an art advisor and free-lance curator, organizing exhibitions with several contemporary artists and estates, including Ray Johnson, Mathew Cerletty, Deborah Remington, Roger Brown, and Clifford Owens among others.