Amnesia

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Amnesia, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with New York based artist Joanne Greenbaum. Through paintings and sculptures spanning from 2000 through 2025, Amnesia showcases the artist’s dynamic, bold, and ever-changing approach to abstraction. An essay written by Jay Gorney was commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition.

"I’ve always admired and been slightly in awe of those painters who stand in front of a blank canvas and attempt to reinvent the wheel–to create an entirely new take on their own pictorial language with each painting. Joanne Greenbaum is one of those artists, so it’s not surprising that she chose to call this exhibition Amnesia, a fair description of that moment when she deliberately forgets everything and faces a new painting with an open and receptive mind.

I talked to Joanne about her choice of title. “When I start to work, I always seem to forget what I’ve done before.” Although a sort of painterly muscle memory kicks in, she tries to rid her mind of pre-conceived ideas as she begins a new work. Facing the blank canvas, then, the “beginner’s mind” meets the experienced hand, letting each new painting feel both surprisingly free and unmistakably hers. Greenbaum’s paintings juggle flamboyant curvilinear forms with structural angular shapes, areas of drawing with richly painted surfaces. There is enormous variation of density and openness, lightness and weight both within each work and from painting to painting. Although her forms often have a distinctly architectural feeling (a previous exhibition was called Scaffold), Greenbaum is clear about the fact that her vocabulary is not rooted in representation. She displays an unerring sense of compositional rightness as she deploys diverse mediums and approaches within each painting.

The works included in Amnesia span roughly a decade and display the extent of the artist’s bravura and range. I’m newly struck by the elegance of a 2019 canvas, in which a jagged black diagonal bisects a pale canvas covered with lightly drawn curlicues and lines. This beautifully composed abstract painting balances both with rigor and delicacy. I can’t help but compare this work with a dark painting from 2013, in which a large, aggressively rendered pink and blue form stretches across the nocturnal canvas. Here, Greenbaum’s quickly drawn lines seem etched into the black ground. The same highly personal vocabulary of jagged shapes and quickly drawn curves is completely transformed as she creates a radically different sort of work. It’s satisfying to see Joanne Greenbaum’s own deft take on the weighty, often ponderous history of abstract painting as she creates beautiful, intelligent works with her own lighter, highly personal language."