Art review
Joanne Greenbaum’s cacophonous symphony of individual signs, shapes and colors is coherent without obscuring the individuality of each element.
Joanne Greenbaum is perhaps the only artist who came of age in the 1980s, extending the visual innovations of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Asian ink painting into new, unexpected territory in which signs can convey stillness and accelerating movement. She achieved this by reintroducing the hand and drawing into painting at a time when it was dominated by a stylized aesthetic, while using different media and processes in each work: using oil paint, acrylic, flash, oil marker, ink, ballpoint pen, colored pencil, markers and other various, seemingly incommensurable materials, she colors the canvas, creates flat and airy forms and defines open, linear constructions. The result is a cacophonous symphony of individual signs, shapes and colors that somehow cohere without obscuring the individuality of each element. Her tour de force compositions feel discovered in the process of their creation.
The 13 paintings, three ballpoint pen drawings and five ceramic sculptures in her current exhibition, Memory lossat Nino Mier Gallery (all untitled and dated between 2010 and 2025) reveal even more sides of her multifaceted approach to art. For example, she has used a metallic glaze for one ceramic work, and silver leaf and an oil-based Sharpie for another. It’s like different people made them, but somehow they’re all Joanne Greenbaum.
In a conversation with artist Amy Sillman, Greenbaum said of her creative process:
I don’t really scrape away. I just keep adding until the painting feels like it doesn’t need anything more. But there must be a lot of air in it, otherwise you will suffer from claustrophobia.
In a 2014 painting, colored lines flow together in different configurations, peeking through flat, curved, monochromatic and puzzle-like shapes, rendered in a variety of oranges, blues, reds, pinks and violets. Placed on top of this layered composition is a large, split black shape that appears to alternate between two- and three-dimensionality. Although the different layers feel connected, it is unclear how, as she has followed no discernible formula. As powerful as this combination of elements is, Greenbaum doesn’t make it a recipe for success; there is no other painting like this in it Memory loss.
For a 2016 work, Greenbaum draws irregular concentric circles with a ballpoint pen that culminate in an opaque area near the center. The composition is reminiscent of water running down a drain, but the bubblegum pink ground breaks any connection we can make to a real scene, while elevating the images to something that can only happen in paint. Greenbaum is not interested in similarity; However, her ability to evoke associations, even as she underlines that we are looking at paint and stains on a canvas, is one of the interesting paradoxes of her art. The dimensional blue and pink shape in a 2013 work looks like nothing we know, while a painting from 2025 might be reminiscent of an aerial view of a futuristic city.
That Greenbaum can traverse a perceptual territory that moves from object to place to action without ever crossing the line of representation is just one of the many pleasures of her art. There is an infectious joy in it that has nothing to do with style or statement. That deep-seated satisfaction of turning the banal into something wild – which is rare in art and poetry – can also be found in Joe Brainard’s experimental memoir, I remember (1970), and the poetry of Frank O’Hara, who wrote: “Grace to be born and live as different as possible.”
Joanne Greenbaum: Amnesia continues through February 21 at the Nino Mier Gallery (62 Crosby Street, Soho, Manhattan). The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
