Exhibition News: Witek's historic paintings from the 1980s to open at Minus Space
Joan Witek, “Las Meninas,” 1980, Oil and graphite on canvas, 68 x 92 in. (172.7 x 233.7 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Artist Estate Studio, LLC, Brooklyn. Photo: Jason Mandella
Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s
March 7-April 25, 2020
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7, 4-6pm
Minus Space
16 Main Street, Suite A, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.minusspace.com | info@minusspace.com | 718-801-8095
Minus Space is pleased to present the solo exhibition Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s. On view will be eight major paintings dating from 1980-1985, all of which have not been publicly on view since their debut in Witek’s solo survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1984. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Artist Estate Studio, LLC, Brooklyn.
Joan Witek, “Introductory Glyph,” 1982, Oil and graphite on canvas, 95 x 60 in. (241.3 x 152.4 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Artist Estate Studio, LLC, Brooklyn
At a time when the very validity of the modernist canon is being questioned and reassessed, the paintings and drawings of Joan Witek are ripe for rediscovery. Decade after decade Witek has created variations on variations motivated solely by the color black. Powerful yet haunting in monochromatic pulse, “Black is, quite simply, the color of language,” Witek recently explained.
Rising from the decades dominated by the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and her neighbor Richard Serra, Witek, a figure in the New York art scene since the 70s, has adopted her own processes borrowed from a minimalistic language. Electing to use only black and, by making the visual distinction between the elements slight, Witek has produced compositions that deliberately avoid the formal and coloristic drama associated with much of Postwar American art.
In this selection of large scale works, Witek sought a kind-of purity, filling her surfaces with vertical and horizontal lines with measured strokes laid side by side in rows—variety comes from the presence of the unprimed canvas between these strokes. The fascination in Witek’s work is this variety—the play with a basic integrity of surface, edge, luminosity, and texture.
“I wished to reconcile abstraction and feeling,” Witek once told Jonathan Caldwell, curator of her 1984 solo survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art in which many of the works on view in this exhibition were featured.
“The irony of the work […] is in appearing to be simple and easily grasped visually while an ongoing language of proportion and content proceeds through each work. Each painting depends on the others for interpretation. They are a handwriting. Although the writing style is relatively uniform, each picture has a uniquely based origin in my emotions or wherever a particular painting comes from. Its themes are the art of painting, or my perceptions of the world, or the renderings of my insides.” — Joan Witek, 1984
The exhibition arrives during a time of increased visibility for the artist and this particular moment in her oeuvre. The visually striking Equivalent (1983), an oil and graphite measuring more than nine feet across, is currently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art following the institution’s reinstallation of its postwar and contemporary art galleries in 2018.
Joan Witek (b. 1943, New York, NY) has used the color black for much of her life as an artist. While appearing to be simple and easily grasped, there is an ongoing language of proportion and meaning in this abstraction for her. Black is usually considered the absence of color: it is severe, rigorous, associated with emptiness and 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."
Joan Witek lives and works in New York City. Selected solo exhibitions include: Jason McCoy Gallery (’15), Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn (’14); Atea Ring Gallery (’06, ’02), Gallery Niklas van Bartha, London (’03), Kouros Gallery (‘03) CDS Gallery (’01), Wynn Kramarsky (’97), John Davis Gallery (’87, ’88) Rosa Esman Gallery (’85, ’85). Recent selected group exhibitions include: “Positive, Negative,” Massey Klein Gallery (’20); “Crossroads: Carnegie Museum of Art’s Collection, 1945 to Now,” Carnegie Museum of Art (‘18); “Painting Black,” Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest, Germany (‘18); “Black & White: Modern and Contemporary Positions,” Jason McCoy Gallery, New York; 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 (2010); Sammlung Schroth, Kloster Wedinghausen, Germany (‘11, ‘12), Gallery Niklas von Bartha, London (‘09).
Her work can be found in many prominent public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (NY), Arkansas Arts Center (AR), Fogg Art Museum at Harvard (MA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (NY) and the Yale University Art Gallery (CT) to name a few.
About Minus Space
Founded in 2003, MINUS SPACE presents the past, present, and future of reductive art on the international level. The gallery’s sixteenth season is focused on living women artists and will feature solo exhibitions by Leslie Roberts, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Gabriele Evertz, and Joan Witek.