JOANNE GREENBAUM

Joanne Greenbaum’s cacophonous symphony of individual marks, shapes, and colors coheres without obscuring the individuality of each element.

Two shows up now, Dona Nelson at Canada Gallery and Joanne Greenbaum at Nino Mier Gallery, are powerful examples of abstract painting’s protean nature for continual renewal. As dissimilar as the sensibilities of Dona Nelson and Joanne Greenbaum are in the singularity of their respective visions, their dynamic structures, which function as vehicles of pleasure, share a mode of construction that exhibits what it means to think abstractly through the fundamental act of painting. Abstraction here is not about extracting universal principles or ideas, it is an abstraction that sees the complicated condition of multiplicities in flux prior to fixed forms.