Joanna Pousette-Dart

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by New York based abstract painter Joanna Pousette-Dart. This will be the gallery’s first solo presentation with Pousette-Dart, following the recent announcement of representation.

Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, and having studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont amongst the likes of Greenbergian Formalists Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. However, despite this traditional modernist background, her paintings remain anything but conventional. Pousette-Dart’s shaped paintings are unique in their melding of formal and poetic concerns, and take their inspiration from many sources: Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself, to name a few.  

The presentation at Lisson Gallery’s Tenth Avenue space features four large-scale multi-panel paintings, each composed of curved canvases, a format Pousette-Dart has explored since 1990 while working in Galisteo, New Mexico. The dynamic configurations of these works evoke the constantly shifting light and form, the vastness of the spaces, and the sense of the earth’s curvature that she experienced there. Works in the exhibition such as Plateau (2019), measuring more than 11 feet across, and 2 Part Variation #3 (After Pierrot) (2015) evoke the earth’s curvature, as well as the characteristically dramatic light experienced in the Southwest.