Silk & Song is the title of American artist Joan Snyder’ first solo exhibition at Galerie Haas Zürich. Since the late 1960s, the American artist (*1940) has been exploring the possibilities of abstract painting, inspiring generations of emerging artists with her transformative approach. Incorporating her strong belief in the idea of a “female sensibility” Snyder developed a very unique formal language challenging the male-dominated art world early on. The exhibition Joan Snyder: Silk & Song runs until October 22, 2021. The show is accompanied by a catalog with a text by Norman L. Kleeblatt and an interview between Joan Snyder and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Joan Snyder: Silk & Song / Galerie Haas Zürich. Opening reception, September 10, 2021.
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Born April 16, 1940 in Highland Park, NJ, Joan Snyder received her AB from Douglass College in 1962 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. Snyder has been the recipient of several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974.
Joan Snyder first gained public attention in the early 1970s with her gestural and elegant “stroke paintings”, which used the grid to deconstruct and retell the story of abstract painting. By the late 70s Snyder, abandoning the formality of the grid, began to more explicitly incorporate symbols and text, as the paintings took on a more complex materiality. Often referred to as an autobiographical or confessional artist, her paintings are essentially narratives of both personal and communal experiences. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired generations of emerging artists. Her early works were included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial.
Snyder is represented in numerous museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Guggenheim Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Phillips Collection. In 2021, Tate Modern, London acquired her seminal work Dark Strokes Hope from the 1970s.
Snyder has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions The Summer Becomes a Room at Canada Gallery, New York City (2020) and Rosebuds & Rivers at Blain/Southern, London (2019); and in 2018, her work was included in Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera an ongoing exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Snyder currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY.
(Info text: excerpts from the websites of Joan Snyder and Galerie Haas).
