Joanna Pousette-Dart: Centering – The Brooklyn Rail

3 October 2024

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.

Read more of Lilly Wei's review for The Brooklyn Rail here.

Image: Joanna Pousette-Dart, Untitled (6), 2023. Acrylic on wood panel, 86 1/4 x 104 x 1 1/4 inches. © Joanna Pousette-Dart. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.