Combining paintings by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz in Intersection Fine Art Projects was a Genie Battle at Steven Harvey. Open a week later A flat gardencompiled by Stephen Westfall, closed in Alexandre Gallery, Intersection Is another memory that flat abstraction blooms, even if the art world rarely focuses on it. Both church and Hankwitz, old practitioners of geometric abstraction, contain turn lines that distinguish them from the hard lines and shapes that characterized the exhibition of Westfall, and both use black as a color, after which the differences become more interesting than the similarities.
The three paintings of the church in the exhibition mark a break of her most famous work, geometric abstractions that refer to the female body. Even in the painting “Untitled (Ultinged)” (2024), a viewer would be difficult to call the outlined, rounded shapes “human”. If you are on reading them as buttocks – and that is certainly your privilege – the church has placed them around various irregular, sharply angular black -white shapes. These forms, such as those in the other two paintings, are difficult to read as pure geometric. This ambiguity passes on the works with a sense of tension, because they never become fully representative or abstract.
Fans who loved the lighthearted, disturbing, naughty humor of the church (including myself while I recorded her work in a show that I had compiled for the Maryland Institute of Art in 2002) were surprised – these recent paintings have dropped their humor, as well as the cunning physical references. Nevertheless, their elusiveness carries them in a new perceptual dimension in which Innuendo – the connection between the pure visual and the discursive – is no longer the main load. The separation of language adds depth to the paintings of the church and opens a new territory.
The winding abstractions of Jenny Hankwitz consist of elongated, spherical shapes that revolve around each other. The artist works with a limited palette of four to five colors and composes interlocking, overlapping and emerging forms of which the interior logic never reveals. This resistance to interpretation, which she shares with the church, is one of her strengths, especially because the work indicates things that are sufficient to refuse the label of pure abstraction.
What I especially like about the work of Hankwitz is that I cannot see a clear precedent. She seems to have found her own way of abstraction, without the influence of celebrated predecessors, such as Frank Stella, Al Held or Ellsworth Kelly. A thin connection with the late Henri Matisse is clear, but to concentrate on that, there would be a bad service for Hankwitz, because her forms did not seem to come from nature.
The distinctive feature of the painting by Hankwitz is everything it seems to be on the move. Tubular shapes swell and contract. The shifting figure ground relationship is difficult to distinguish. Do we look at color, shape or a flat object? The color will change between edges, even if the shape continues. All interruptions keep our eye in motion.
In the paintings of Hankwitz, non -identifiable things and abstract forms change identities. The spherical tubular forms of the artist share something with the paint-as-day casting of abstract expressionism. Just like the late abstractions of Pollock, the art of Hankwitz is expanding further than the edges of the painting. We look at a smooth world of shapes in circular and wavey movement of which we do not fully understand inner effect.
The firmness of the paintings of Church and Hankowitz cannot be denied. Both have followed their own process without surrendering to the pressure around them. Doing that in a long time is not as easy as it sounds.
Cross: Abstractions by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz Continue at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) until 8 March. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
