"I began the shaped canvases in Galisteo, New Mexico. The curved shape enabled me to develop a pictorial expression that seems to extend, that suggests movement, and that seemed to enable an expression of the immeasurable vastness and versatility of space as I had experienced there. I understood these images as a kind of dialogue between myself and the distant horizon.”
Joanna Pousette-Dart, born 1947, lives and works in New York. Beginning in the mid-1970s, she made numerous trips to New Mexico. During her visits, inspired by the expansive landscape experienced there, she abandoned the rectangular form of her paintings to develop dynamically balanced panels, whose curved shapes sought to capture the lines of the horizon, the changing conditions of light and the vastness of space. In addition to these landscape references, her paintings are characterized by ornamental forms, Romanesque, as well as Islamic and Indian, influences. Her work moves between landscape and abstraction, playing with lines, colors and forms in such a way as to appear extremely modern, yet bearing an extremely poetic expression.
A catalogue accompanied the exhibition.