Joanne Greenbaum

Joanne Greenbaum is a New York-based artist who makes oil-on-canvas abstract paintings. To start a painting, Greenbaum makes a mark and follows its lead. One shape or color suggests another, then another, and gradually the canvas begins to fill and a provisional structure appears. Cross-hatched scrawls of paint may overlay one large area of straight-from-the-tube pigment, or appear to undergird it. A black and orange checkerboard pattern may organize the top of a painting, while beneath it more free-form figments of paint run riot. Greenbaum’s palette is similarly rampant, mixing iridescent with more muted colors and allowing hues to jostle and clash. The artist’s hand, with its scribbled lines and looping brushstokes, is always apparent. She makes her thinking—and rethinking—visible. The paintings stage themselves: they enact the process of their own making. Greenbaum stays close to the doodle—a pictorial whim, notated freely—and this gives her paintings an exuberant, freewheeling sense of drawing in paint.

Greenbaum exhibited four large paintings in the Locker Plant’s front room. 25 smaller paintings—executed quickly, with the paint still drying on some—were hung salon-style in the back.

Joanne Greenbaum lives and works in New York. Over the past ten years she has participated in numerous group shows in the U.S. and Europe and had solo exhibitions at D’Amelio Terras in New York, greengrassi in London, and Galerie Nicolas Krupp in Basel, Switzerland. Later this year she will have a solo show at Boom/Shane Campbell in Chicago, and in 2008 a career-spanning survey of her work was mounted at the Haus Konstruktiv museum in Zurich. The survey then traveled to the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany.