Joan Witek in her Duane Street Loft, NYC, 1974. © 2022 Joan Witek / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
| “ | I am attracted to black because of the beauty of the color and for me, its infinite variety. It is a color that has been my inspiration since I began painting... Black is usually considered the absence of color: it is severe and rigorous but this is only two facets of its many qualities. One of the reasons I am attracted to black is indeed its dichotomies. It is sophisticated and primitive, emotional and intellectual, it is a color that everyone responds strongly to, in one way or another |
JOAN WITEK (b.1943) has been probing the complexities, meanings, and infinite variety of the color black for her entire artistic life. While appearing to be simple and easily grasped there is an ongoing language of proportion and meaning in this resolve to abstraction. Black is usually considered the absence of color: it is severe, rigorous, associated with death, or depression or repression. But as Lilly Wei has written: Witek plays these oppositions in her work: black being ascetic and alluring, meditative and expressive, flawless and flawed, fierce and demure, a distinct unequivocal presence, yet subtle, elusive.
Recent solo exhibitions include Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest, Germany (2021); Minus Space, Brooklyn (2020); Jason McCoy Gallery, New York ('15); Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn ('14); Kunstmuseum Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus, Soest, Germany ('13); Drawn / Taped / Burned: Abstraction on Paper, Katonah Museum of Art ('11); Black and White, Gallerie Weinberger, Copenhagen, Denmark ('10); Sammlung Schroth, Kloster Wedinghausen, Arnsberg, Germany ('12, '11), Gallery Niklas von Bartha, London ('09).
Her work can be found in many public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (NY), Arkansas Arts Center (AR), Carnegie Museum of Art (PA), Fogg Art Museum at Harvard (MA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (NY), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), and the Yale University Art Gallery (CT) among others.