Joanne Greenbaum

Joanne Greenbaum’s playful abstractions approach painting with a sense of liberation. Primarily concerned with the formalism of plastic arts, her canvases don’t follow proscribed formulas of conventional painting, but rather continuously test and expand the possibilities by which painting can evolve. In Poster, Greenbaum’s graphic composition unfolds with its own rules of logic: bold shapes and colours are mapped out and dissected by the improbable blue-print of their design. Greenbaum’s diagram motif acts as both a structural device and an extension of her painterly consumption; her delicately drawn lines exhibit a contemplated intimacy and dimension of fantastical space, suggesting an inexhaustible microcosm of illusionary delight.

Drawing becomes an all-consuming force in Joanne Greenbaum’s paintings; the ephemeral intricacy of her surfaces is fixated in her concentrated gestures. In Table of Contents, Greenbaum’s solid masses of colour swell from and dissolve into attenuated mark-making: purple and orange architectural forms spring up with sketchy velocity, the matt black ground devours the painting, its smothering energy disintegrating short of the canvas edge. The chaotic system of numbers and diagrams serves as formalist play: the pleasure of stroking silver-white over black, the frantic vivacity of red and blue squiggles dancing between a web of lines. Table of Contents reads like a lexicon of everything; an encompassing sentiment expressed in minute detail.

Joanne Greenbaum’s canvases display a rarefied process of precipitance. Greenbaum’s paintings evolve through an organic process; her compositions directed by their continuously evolving forms, creating spontaneous tension through the immediacy of the artist’s hand. A deliberate lack of editing transpires as painterly confidence: each gesture contains an importance of its own realisation and ultimate contribution. In Trend Report, Greenbaum’s forms drip, spill, and overlap in competition for space: doodled numbers claim territories, while traces of lines rise defiantly through rich fields of colour. By laying bare her process, Greenbaum’s painting resonates with a sense of passing time, monumentalising the history of its own creation.