PREVIEW:Joan Snyder-Body & Soul

Joan Snyder’s career spans more than fifty years, through which she has continuously invented and expanded upon her singular technical and material vocabulary within painting. This approach has resulted in a unique, recognizable voice that is visually expressed, and that evokes a personal emotive impact. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the artist’s “Stroke paintings” that are widely regarded as an essential counterpoint to the male-dominated Minimalist genre of the time , Snyder has rooted her practice in a deeply feminist area.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

“Body & Soul” is the most comprehensive presentation of Joan Snyder’s work outside of the United States to date. Over her career of six decades, Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction, infusing her art with autobiography in a way that was distinct from the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. Featuring more than 30 new and historic paintings, the exhibition traces the evolution of the artist’s practice from 1964 to the present, culminating in eight major new works. Encompassing the guiding principles and themes of her practice, Snyder’s oeuvre is structured around the development of three foundational groups of work: the “Stroke paintings” with which she first garnered widespread recognition at the beginning of the 1970s when they were presented in the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1972) and the Whitney Biennial (1973), the “Symphony” paintings and “Field” paintings. Their visual language extends into her expansive body of paintings beyond these categories, recognisable in her most recent works. Arranged chronologically, a pattern of recurring personal motifs emerges throughout the exhibition in a cyclical rhythm of return and renewal, encompassing love, joy, grief and desire expressed through colour, form and gesture in rich, poetic compositions. The painting that gives the exhibition its title, “Body & Soul” (1997–8), encapsulates an overview of the artist’s varied modes of working. Body and soul becomes a metaphor that brings into dialogue the figurative and the abstract, the painterly and the material, the gestural and the controlled – ideas that reverberate throughout the artist’s wider oeuvre. For Snyder, painting is an expression of feeling in which diaristic autobiography and raw emotion intersect with rigorous formal investigation. The “Stroke” paintings dissect the brushstroke  to explore the ‘anatomy of a painting’ through brightly coloured bars that dance across her canvases. In important early examples on view, including “Whole Segments” (1970) and “Little Yellow” (1971), strokes of vivid color and controlled drips of paint play out in themes and variations across loose grid structures, inviting the viewer to follow their sequence like a narrative. The earliest work on view, “Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting” (1964), marks the artist’s burgeoning interrogation of the relationship between representation and her approach to abstraction. Depicting either a huddled group of mourners or a body laid out for visitation in thick, black brushstrokes set against a dense cream background, it is as much through the gestural swathes of paint as the subject matter that Snyder conveys the emotion of the scene. Her Flock paintings of the same decade constitute imaginary inner landscapes, hinting at human anatomy and women’s sexuality through color and material, rather than symbolic representation, to centre what she calls “the essence of feelings of a female body”. The vocabulary of motifs and symbolic imagery that emerged in the 1970s, beginning with her strokes, continued to develop over the subsequent decades to find enduring resonance in the artist’s later works. Trees and flowers signify cycles of life, death and rebirth, casting nature as an expressive vehicle for the most fundamental of human experiences. The natural world takes on a transcendental quality in Snyder’s paintings, as if body and soul are entwined with the earth, the trees, the sky. In “Lovers” (1989), the bodies of two women glow in peachy tones against a black night sky peppered with flowers to offer a surreal scene rich in feeling and desire. Reimagining this natural imagery within an abstract visual language, the artist’s Field paintings were inspired by the agricultural landscapes surrounding her studio in Eastport, Long Island in the 1980s. The canvas is cast as a site of experimentation that is simultaneously a plane for abstract mark making and a muddy field planted with beans, weeds, pumpkins, breasts and celestial bodies, as in “Moons in Mudfield” (1989). Elsewhere, screaming heads throw open their mouths in existential howls of pain, while bodies, breasts, hearts, wounds and roses speak to fleeting moments of sensuous bodily experience. In paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, these symbols are brought into dialogue with material experimentation in full-blown maximalist compositions. Straw, plant stems, seed pods, twigs, rose hips and dried herbs are collaged with silk, burlap, beads and, as in “Love’s Deep Grapes” (1984), even plastic grapes in a nod to the wry humour that surfaces frequently across Snyder’s work. The imagery, painted gestures and materiality of these works give way, in moments, to language. The most recent body of work on view, created in 2024, revisits and reimagines the concerns that reverberate across the decades of Snyder’s practice. ‘I am looking back because, needless to say, everything here somehow relates to things I’ve done before,’ she says. Impasto roses, straw, controlled drips of paint, breasts and bared teeth, mud and lace sit beside written dedications to literature and family members. Ponds emerge as a central motif in several works, including “Painting at the Pond” (2024) and “Come to Pearl Pond” (2024). Poured directly onto the canvas, dried flowers float in pools of paint, which symbolise portals that traverse the natural, human and spiritual realms in moments of alchemical transformation. This new body of work speaks to Snyder’s continued compulsion to engage in painterly experimentation.

Photo: Joan Snyder, The Field in June, 1985, Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 162.56 cm (60 x 64 in), © Joan Snyder, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration:28/11/2024-5/2/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/