While the big, imposing, hefty men of mid-century American abstraction were trying to reshape the course of art, Joan Snyder was doing something quieter, but no less important. Now 84, Snyder has spent her life using abstraction not for grand gestures, but for smaller, personal ones. Written across the walls of this career-spanning show is a lifetime of emotions and feelings, of memories and experiences, in big bursts of shape and colour.
Most of her career has been a tug of war between abstraction and figuration. The earliest works pull abstraction back from the edge. Thick strokes of paint coalesce into pink and blue landscapes, an almost-portrait of her grandma’s lifeless body. It’s abstract, but dragged back to reality. The best works of that era are collisions of viscous, fleshy pink and slabs of wool painted into the canvases. They look like two bodies coalescing, growing mouldy, becoming one. Very beautiful, very sensual things.
Bubblegum pink gardens, toxic dripping landscapes
Her 1970s works are even better. They’re filled with grids and thick lines of colour; some drip, some smear, they look like someone melted a Kandinsky. Each one feels like a landscape, a portrait, an outpouring of emotion, a formal exercise in mark making, a furious flurry of splashes and drips, they’re restrained but explosive, intense but free. You can read so much into these compositions of line, colour and drips because Snyder put so much into them.
The 1980s works are pretty heinous though. Snyder lets figuration play a bigger role, painting trees and moons in sombre midnight landscapes. The results are pretty gross, just these awkward, ugly, dark messes.
Amazingly though, the newest paintings are her best. It’s like she’s stopped trying to officiate a battle between figuration and abstraction and is just letting everyone have at it. There are flowers and screaming mouths, scrawled words and drips of colour, thick sculptural mounds of paint and big washes of red. They’re bubblegum pink gardens, toxic dripping landscapes, they’re the sight of someone brilliant doing whatever the hell they want to do.
You can try to figure out the ingredients of Snyder’s art; the bits of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois and Kandinsky that have been mixed into this visual soup. But really, the dish here is Snyder’s, and Snyder’s alone. And it’s delicious.
