Joanna Pousette-Dart: Etruscan Drawings
8 June – 11 July 2021
Lisson Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of works by Joanna Pousette-Dart, which she refers to as her 'Estruscan Drawings'. These were created following a number of visits to the Etruscan tombs of central Italy. Since her first visit in 2013, Pousette-Dart has been inspired by the beauty, simplicity and immediacy of these ancient works and began to incorporate their powerful influence into her work.
These drawings are not meant as depictions or one to one references, but are rather an attempt to capture and express the energy and vitality of the tomb paintings as she experienced them. They synthesize the architecture, the beauty of the natural setting of the tombs, and the power and simplicity of the human, animal and vegetal forms depicted. In the drawings, one feels a sense of stratified zones and spaces similar to the different shaped panels of her paintings, which suggest horizons and multiple vanishing points. As with the paintings, these are interconnected with suggestive calligraphic lines and forms that flow through and interweave them, as if to join different realms. All the compositions are suffused with their own ambient quality of light.
Pousette-Dart’s fascination with the Etruscan tombs represents a continuation of her interest and admiration for painted places and she seeks to distill aspects of their all-encompassing complexity in these drawings. As in much of her work, one feels a simultaneous dialogue between the immensity of landscape and the intimacy of human form.
Read moreWorks on view
On the occasion of Joanna Pousette-Dart's first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in March 2020 in New York, a special in conversation event was held with the artist and Phong Bui, Publisher and Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail.
Read more about the exhibition they discuss here.
Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, and having studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont amongst the likes of Greenbergian Formalists Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. However, despite this traditional modernist background, her paintings remain anything but conventional. Pousette-Dart’s shaped paintings are unique in their melding of formal and poetic concerns, and take their inspiration from many sources: Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself, to name a few.
Read more about Pousette-Dart here.
Excerpt from an interview in Brooklyn Rail's June 2019 issue:
Barbara Rose: You spent years traveling. What specific art works particularly affected you?
Joanna Pousette-Dart: The Alhambra in Granada, Spain; wall paintings in Taül, Catalonia; Giotto’s Arena Chapel; the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna; the Etruscan tomb paintings; the caves… I could go on, and I haven’t mentioned Mexico. Painted places that meld art with architecture have always been a huge source of inspiration for me. The experience of being in these places made me want to try to build some of the feeling of encompassing space into my own work and to make the paintings interact with the wall to create their own sense of place.
Image: The Tomb of the Leopards, an Etruscan necropolis at Tarquinia, Italy, 480-450 B.C. Photograph © Alamy
Installation views
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (29 March – 30 June 2019)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (29 March – 30 June 2019)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (29 March – 30 June 2019)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (29 March – 30 June 2019)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (29 March – 30 June 2019)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Lisson Gallery, New York (29 February – 3 July 2020)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Lisson Gallery, New York (29 February – 3 July 2020)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Lisson Gallery, New York (29 February – 3 July 2020)
Joanna Pousette-Dart at Lisson Gallery, New York (29 February – 3 July 2020)