Joanna Pousette-Dart

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s shaped, multi-panel paintings investigate the experience of space, light, and perception. Conceived as spatial continuums rather than fixed images, each work emerges through a continual dialogue between its outer form and inner drawing, with line, colour, and structure operating as inseparable elements. Composed of curved, interconnected panels, her paintings unfold through the viewer’s movement, as forms and spatial relationships continually shift and recombine. Although rooted in sustained observation of the landscape, particularly the vastness, light, and spatial anomalies of land and sky, they are less concerned with describing place than with the act of perceiving it. Drawing on a broad range of visual traditions, from Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy to medieval fresco cycles, Mozarabic manuscripts,Islamic art, and Indigenous artistic practices of the Americas, Pousette-Dart has developed a visual language that is both deeply personal and expansive, balancing the specificity of lived experience with a sense of impermanence, mutability, and timelessness.

Joanna Pousette-Dart was born in 1947 to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of Painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, in New York, NY where she continues to live and work today. She has a BA from Bennington College, Vermont (1968). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wiesbaden Museum, Wiesbaden, Germany; Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, USA; Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Texas Gallery, Houston, TX, USA; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, USA; and Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, NY, USA, as well as a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Pousette-Dart has been featured in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, among others. Her work is held in public collections around the world including Buffalo AKG Museum, Buffalo, NY, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, USA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, USA. In 2021 she was selected to become a National Academician by The National Academy of Design in New York.