The Brooklyn Rail

It is immensely satisfying to be in the company of the eight resplendent canvases on panel by veteran New York abstract artist Joanna Pousette-Dart. Each large scale painting—one per wall—is a showstopper. Their scale is characteristically ambitious, and the paintings seem even grander because their contours are rounded, which gives them a sense of expandability, of a pliancy and potential stretch that feels corporeal and not constricted by the adamant edges of a conventional rectilinear format. In fact, there are no straight lines here: a feminist stance?

Schooled in a modernist aesthetic, Pousette-Dart soon veered away from non-objective formalism to a more personalized, independent aesthetic. Abstractions sourced in landscapes and painted on multi-paneled shaped canvases have been her calling card since the early 1990s. They are also marvelously quirky—no one else makes paintings quite like these. What is new is that although consisting of two sections, the surface of each work appears unified, the sections meticulously fitted into each other, unlike many of her previous works in which the parts are stacked and distinctly visible, pulled slightly apart to thrust dynamically outward at the edges, with a nod to totemic structures. Another difference is a somewhat more equitable balancing of verticality and the horizontal, the equilibrium tauter, the asymmetry of the figurations verging on the symmetrical. The show is aptly called Centering, something that is an act in progress and, for most of us, relatable as a lifelong pursuit.

The shape might suggest an elevation emerging from the land, a mesa, perhaps, or a mound, a kind of tumulus, something created by nature. Its top edge arches up, repeated in the curve of the bottom edge, which gives the whole a lively, compelling, defiant buoyancy that is unusual in works of this size. To further add to the sensation of lightness, the panels are beveled so that they seem suspended in space, floating away from the wall. Their buoyancy recalls poet John Giorno’s reassuring observation that everyone gets lighter—and, perhaps, everything as well. These recent works remain a cross between painting and sculptural relief that the artist has often referred to as a shaping of space, a framing of the world that is a consequence of her peripheral vision, and an essential point of departure.

Reading them yields a curious, captivating mix of oppositions: assertive and reserved, robust and delicate, warm and cool, dark and light, positive and negative, interpretations that can reverse themselves, the negative space, say, suddenly appearing as a kind of solid, a plenitude, suffused by a dense luminosity that is not empty at all. The nearly invisible split between the two panels acts like a horizon line, an intimation of the majestic sweep of the Southwest, of New Mexico and its spellbinding panoramas. The well-traveled Pousette-Dart has spent significant time there, and long ago fell in love with its natural beauties and the sublime range of colors that brush land and sky, smitten also by the ancient art of Native Americans, which has found its way into her imagination accompanied by influences from other cultures and countries, in particular Islamic, part of the challenge (and the fun) is to discover what they might be.

She is a gifted colorist, although in this show, her range is best assessed in the works on paper than in the paintings in which the palette has been pared down to a few hues, predominantly blues and greens—although there is an array of shades—interspersed with strategically placed pale or warm areas. The paint is often more translucent, even wet-looking, and there is a pink of extraordinary tenderness in Centering #4 (2024) that approximates the color of dawn that you should look for. The reduction of color forefronts the compositional structure, as evidenced in the deep blue and yellow of Centering #5 (2024), topped by white. The most colorful piece on view is Centering #3 (2024), its red alone brilliant enough to crimson the entire gallery. The application of the acrylic is looser, drips in evidence, the brushwork softer, smudgy, with traces of her touch throughout. In these works, the role of the panels has been taken over by the painting, now doing most of the work, part of the artist’s intense, ongoing debate between content and support, between what constitutes painting, what constitutes subject.

Pousette-Dart has been working for more than five decades, and has always gone her own way, inspired by her own sophisticated, idiosyncratic vision. As abstraction of this kind is once again in favor, perhaps the times have finally caught up with her.