Joan Snyder’s Abstract Landscapes Dismantle Expectations

In an impressive survey at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, the artist’s often-ambiguous paintings stimulate new ways of seeing

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BY Ellen Mara De Wachter in Exhibition Reviews | 20 JAN 25

The earliest work in this six-decade survey of Joan Snyder’s art, Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting (1964), is an ambiguous picture. A body is laid out for visitation, limbs outlined in black and ochre, interlaced with a pillowy white shroud. Or so it seems until the scale shifts and the agitated stripes in the chest area transform into a gathering of mourners on snowy ground. Another option: this is a figure and a landscape, but also a composition of abstract marks. 

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Joan Snyder, Stroke Landscape, 1968, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 25 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London; photograph: Adam Reich

In the late 1960s, Snyder initiated her ‘Stroke’ series, celebrating the vital gesture of painting. Initially, she located her brushstrokes within landscapes. In Stroke Landscape (1968), the canvas is divided horizontally: the top half constitutes a solid pink sky; the bottom half is strewn with browns, greens and ochres against an ecru ground. Snyder’s dashes and chubby lines seem to result from her brush lovingly caressing the canvas, which lends the works an erotic charge associated with creation and life energy. They are also meant to stimulate new ways of seeing. In a 1969 text, reprinted in the gallery pamphlet, she declares: ‘ISOLATE THE STROKE AND SSEEEEE COLOR …’

In Flesh Flock Painting with Strokes and Stripes (1969), such marks populate the bottom half of a pinkish-beige hourglass figure. Across its top half, endowed with breast-like curves, scattered forms in greenish tones evoke mouths or yonis. Erupting from the centre of the image, a ring of flock – fibrous in texture, sprayed with pink – lends the picture an unruly sensuality. Rather than strokes as individual parts, here entire sections of the composition seem to both stand on their own and remain inseparable from the whole. 

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Joan Snyder, ‘Body & Soul’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London; photograph: Aggie Cherrie

Snyder’s works revel in this kind of internal multiplicity, like paintings within a painting. In Baby Grand (1981), five such semi-autonomous artworks co-exist on a single canvas. Small in scale yet panoramic in format, Baby Grand spans a moody black abstract gashed with red, a roiling metallic impasto, a pretty impressionist stroke painting, a collage of blue squares and a tiled composition of green monochromes (which, in itself, could count as 15 tiny colour field works). The playful array of styles, textures, processes and colours showcases Snyder’s versatility, but it also demonstrates that coherence can tolerate multiplicity. Far from being chaotic, it excites the system.

In Body & Soul (1997–98), this strategy turns exuberant as the upper half of the canvas is divided into eight squares comprising monochromes, stroke paintings, bits of straw trapped behind gauze, and leopard-print fabric with a glittering red mouth disgorging a trail of Pepto-Bismol pink paint. Are these thought bubbles emanating from the life-size female figure lying beneath them, her legs spread wide? Over the woman’s vulva, in a gesture of impish sensuality, the artist has hung a bunch of plastic grapes to round off a work that sizzles with humour.

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Joan Snyder, Come to Pearl Pond, 2024, oil, acrylic, burlap, paper mache, poppy pods, rosebuds, dried flowers, straw, paper and ink on canvas, 1.2 × 1.2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London; photograph: Adam Reich

In a room of their own, eight new works (all 2024) return to landscape. Several feature large ‘ponds’ made by pouring paint onto horizontal canvases. The lustrous silver pool on the lefthand panel of the diptych Come to Pearl Pond is contained by ridges of white, pink and brown impasto, and scattered with dried rosebuds, poppy seedheads and straw. Like a mirror, it is both attractive and confronting. The righthand panel itemises some of Snyder’s strokes: juicy, dry, crumbly; cooling, grounding, dramatic; wide, short, drippy. Together, they are a reminder of the inextricable relationship between landscape, abstraction and figuration that the artist has explored throughout her career. Whatever scale or surface she chooses, Snyder translates experiences into art and back again, dismantling expectations of what a painting might be and reassembling things in vivid new ways. 

Joan Snyder's ‘Body & Soul’ is on view at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, until 5 February 

Main image: Joan Snyder, Painting at the Pond (detail), 2024, oil, acrylic, paper mache, burlap, rose petals and buds, straw, paper and ink on canvas, 1.4 × 1.7 m. Courtesy: the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London; photograph: Adam Reich

Ellen Mara De Wachter is based in London, UK.

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