Joanne Greenbaum

b. New York, NY, US Lives and works in New York, NY, US New York-based artist Joanne Greenbaum has explored congestion and space, order and chaos, and color and blankness as central tensions animating her frenetic, lively works for three decades. The irreverence of graffiti, the meandering quality of doodles, the psychological charge of handwriting, and the spatial awareness of blueprinting are all invoked across Greenbaum’s vibrant, and challenging drawings and paintings. Drawing is a central pillar of the artist’s work, occupying a position as important as – and foundational to – her painting. Greenbaum draws constantly, and through that physical, meditative, and hermetic work, develops visual idioms centered on form and color that evolve over the course of many iterations. For instance, a series of ball-point pen drawings – a mainstay of her career – represent layered, heavy geometric forms budding amid tangles of looping, lighter-toned scribbles. Despite their similarities, the impressions left by the formal structure of each work change significantly. At times, the painted and drawn forms resemble abstracted architectural plans or urban topographies, and at others, they resemble the hazy shapeliness of paintings by Orphists such as Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia. Greenbaum employs a panoply of materials to create her drawings, from ballpoint pen and archival marker to colored pencil, gouache, and watercolor. As John Yau put it in Hyperallergic: “In contrast to many of her contemporaries who have established a set of constraints within which to work – and this can be a grid, choice of colors, size of the canvas, or even subject matter – Greenbaum seems intent on leaving no avenue unexplored.”