Joanna Pousette-Dart: Nocturnes

For the latest exhibition in East Hampton, Lisson Gallery presents a selection of paintings by Joanna Pousette-Dart, whose work was the subject of a solo exhibition in the London gallery earlier this year. The presentation highlights Pousette-Dart’s signature format of curved canvases and dynamic compositions, inspired by many sources that include Islamic, Mozarabic and Catalonian art, Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, Mayan and American Indian art, as well as the landscape itself.

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s emphasis on shaped panels has become the focal point of her practice. Sensing the limiting nature of the rectangular canvas, she experiments with new ways to create a pictorial scope that more accurately reflect her perceptions. The subsequent arrangements of arched and bending panels are an organically-evolving alternative, at once evoking the curvature of the earth and one’s field of vision.

The exhibition features three paintings from the artist’s Nocturne series. Inspired by charts used to depict the phases of the moon, Pousette-Dart’s Nocturnes present differing iterations and combinations and iterations of suggestive forms. Nocturne #1 (2016), Nocturne #3 and Nocturne #4 (both 2016-2017) are painted on single wood panels that have each been cut into a unique shape. The interior painting on each of these panels is in dialogue with the panel’s contours, sometimes echoing and sometimes contradicting them, creating a unique synthesis of balance and motion as well as a dynamic ambiguity between figure and ground. The variety of tones in the pared down color range of blues, greys, blacks and white, gives these diminutive works a sense of monumental stillness.