In the Studio with Joanna Pousette-Dart '68
Art and Object takes readers behind-the-scenes into the studio of painter Joanna Pousette-Dart '68, who recently exhibited Centering at Lisson Gallery in New York.
Reports Art and Object:
"Joanna Pousette-Dart has deep art-world credentials. Her husband is abstract painter David Novros, her father was iconic Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, and her mother, the poet Evelyn Gracey. Her home and studio are on Broome Street in lower Manhattan, accessible by street buzzer in a landmarked cast-iron building. Up a flight of stairs is her husband’s studio on the second floor, then the living-dining-cooking area, and finally Pousette-Dart’s bright, spacious studio, neatly filled with works in progress and tacked-up images of inspiration—a photo of a dancing Shiva, another of stacked blocks from an Eduardo Chillida stone sculpture, and then a book of miniature Mozarabic manuscript pages and Islamic and American Indian ceramic bowls.
"One wonders where to begin excavating the 77-year-old artist’s universe. The neat and proto-modernist appearance of her paintings belies a complexity that takes the viewer into a rich personal history embracing Pousette-Dart’s time, place, and cultural history. She studied at Bennington College in Vermont with the likes of Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons; traveled widely through the American Southwest, Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and took in the landscapes and art histories of those regions, merging them with 20th-century modernist art practice as well as a 21st-century sense of artistic freedom. Pousette-Dart is a remarkably direct communicaton in her work, which is at once seductive and elusive. She takes us back to ancient Mayan ceramic works and then to the shapes and jewel tones of Italian Primitive paintings. As a surprise, she mentions the perception studies in the perspective distortions of Japanese conceptual/surrealist painter Jiro Takamatsu, who died in the 1970s."