Discourse: Abstract
Organized by artist curator Gayle Ruskin
September 5 – October 6, 2018
Joan Waltemath grew up on the Great Plains and now lives and works in New York City. Drawing has long been at the root of her artistic practice, serving as a way of thinking though visual material in preparation for painting. At the same time Waltemath challenges her drawings to be autonomous works, which are made using diverse wet and dry materials. Her abstract paintings focus on constructing spatial voids using harmonic progressions and non-traditional, reflective pigments in oil; their scale and dimensions address the body. New sewn canvas works explore the poetics of contingency.
Shown in New York, Chicago, Portland, Baltimore, London, Basel and Cologne, her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Harvard University Art Museum, among others. She has written extensively on art and served as editor-at-large of the Brooklyn Rail since 2001. She taught at the IS Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union from 1997 to 2010 and Princeton University often between 2000-9. She is currently the Director of MICA’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting.
