Joan Snyder: Love from an Abstract Artist - at Thaddaeus Ropac

"Love from an Abstract Artist" surveys over six decades of Joan Snyder’s works on paper, affirming drawing as a vital, autonomous facet of her practice. This exhibition of nearly 50 works demonstrates her continuous expansion of the medium’s possibilities through diaristic, materially rich compositions incorporating collage, fabric, and handmade pulp. Emerging amidst dominant male-centric movements, Snyder developed a distinctly embodied abstract language, deconstructing painting’s "anatomy" to incorporate personal, often corporeal, motifs.

The presentation traces her evolution from early structural investigations, where drawings served as skeletal frameworks for paintings, toward increasingly complex, layered surfaces. The grid recurs as a foundational system to be transgressed, a metronome against which gestural, emotive marks assert themselves. Snyder’s work is deeply autobiographical, fusing subjective experience with formal innovation; her marks operate as a lexicon of love, anguish, and hope.

Language functions as a central material within these compositions, applied not for mere legibility but as graphic gesture. Handwritten texts, ranging from poetic to enraged, interact with imagery, complicating the divide between textual and pictorial representation. The exhibition culminates in recent works where list-making becomes mark-making, underscoring an ironic play on abstraction and communication. Ultimately, Snyder’s oeuvre achieves a profound congruence between formal discovery and personal exploration, where self-expression transcends self-display to resonate as a universal, embodied language.

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