Joan Snyder Body & Soul

Until 5 February 2025

Ely House, London

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How often have I felt when speaking with others that we only scratch the surface of what’s truly meant and felt? It’s most likely the reason that I paint... to be able to say more than I can possibly say at any one time.
— Joan Snyder

Body & Soul is the most comprehensive presentation of Joan Snyder’s work in Europe to date. For the artist, painting is an expression of feeling in which diaristic introspection and raw emotion intersect with rigorous formal investigation, resulting in rich, transcendental works. Over a six-decade career, Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction, infusing her art with autobiography in a way that was distinct from the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting. ‘I wanted… to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex,’ says Snyder.

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When I started painting it was literally like speaking for the first time.

— Joan Snyder

Small Stroke Painting with Blue Square, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 20.32 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in)

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Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting, 1964 Oil on canvas55.88 x 86.36 cm (22 x 34 in)

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Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting (1964) is a rare early work, marking her interrogation of the relationship between representation and abstraction as an emerging artist. The thick, directional brushstrokes depict a huddled group of mourners gathered in a snow-covered cemetery – the longer strokes evoking the undulations of the landscape.

Snyder’s celebrated Stroke paintings enabled the artist to depict the paint stroke while dissecting its many layers to reveal the ‘anatomy of a painting.’ As Snyder says, ‘the paint became the subject, the marks, my voice.’

A formative painting in this series, Veiled Strokes (1969) embodies the artist’s nascent interest in the stroke. Each mark has a unique character: solid and resistant, veil-like and bleeding, yet transparent. Offering a strong sense of verticality, the slightly tapered strokes appear as enlarged drips of paint.

Veiled Strokes, 1969

Oil, acrylic and spray enamel on canvas

182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 in)

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Each stroke is just that
Each stroke is a landscape
Each stroke is an analysis
Each stroke is a language
— Joan Snyder

Flock Painting I, 1969
Acrylic and flock on canvas
124.46 x 154.94 cm (49 x 61 in)

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Wild Strokes Hope, 1972
Oil and acrylic on canvas
152.4 x 304.8 cm (60 x 120 in)

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I wanted more in a painting, not less. I wanted to tell a story, have a beginning, a middle, an end, even resolution… to be able in one painting to have all of this…
— Joan Snyder

An impassioned exploration of the possibilities of the paintbrush, Little Yellow (1971) is a rare example of a Stroke painting that has remained in the personal collection of the artist since its creation. Her treatment of the mark oscillates between opaque swathes of pigment, pastose bar-like strokes and looser, more fluid forms from which paint drips down the canvas beneath.

Little Yellow, 1971
Oil, acrylic, pencil and spray enamel on canvas
60.96 x 60.96 cm (24 x 24 in)

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In these works, and across Snyder’s life’s practice, beauty in nature, visceral color, pain, and loss heave back and forth.
— Devorah Lauter, Artnet

Along with the instrumental reference of the work’s title, Baby Grand (1981) evokes a sense of the musical that asserts the importance of music in Snyder’s practice. Throughout her career, classical and vocal-music concerts have served as catalysts for artistic inspiration. Entering a self-described ‘meditative space’, she sketches in the dark auditorium as the music flows through her. Rhythm, tone and atmosphere find expression in Snyder's explorative approach to abstraction, emphasising the centrality of the sensory in her practice.

Baby Grand, 1981
Oil, acrylic, burlap, paper on canvas
22.86 x 60.96 cm (9 x 24 in)

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Whole Segments, 1970
Oil, acrylic, pearlescent spray paint and pencil on canvas
182.88 x 365.76 cm (72 x 144 in)

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To Transcend / The moon (1985) was painted in response to the artist’s experience of listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1822–24). Divided into two, the left side of the composition translates the transcendental effects of the choral symphony into a geometric visual language. A sense of the rhythmic plays out across the vertical bars of deep blues, violet and mossy green nestled against one another. On the right side of the work, Snyder articulates a scene of rolling water with swirling eddies of paint, illuminated by the moon suspended above.

To Transcend / The moon, 1985
Oil and acrylic on canvas
152.7 x 245.1 cm (60.1 x 96.5 in)

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A set of personal motifs emerges and recurs throughout the works in the exhibition, driven by a cyclical rhythm of return and renewal. These impetuses are distilled in the painting that gives the exhibition its title, Body & Soul (1997–98).

Body & Soul, 1997–1998
Oil, acrylic, fabric, paper mache, glitter, straw and plastic grapes on canvas
167.64 x 198.12 cm (66 x 78 in)

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Painted in the wake of Snyder’s separation from her husband, the motifs in Apple Tree Mass (1983) were derived from a visit to the farm the couple had shared in Martins Creek, PA, with her then two-year-old daughter. Snyder was moved by the sight of an old apple tree, struggling to survive, which became the focus of the composition. Its spindly form is mirrored by a body that was inspired by the stick figures her daughter carved in sand, presented inside an arched shape evoking ecclesiastical architecture. In the words of art historian Hayden Herrera, ‘it is this absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder.’

Apple Tree Mass, 1983

Oil, acrylic, paper mache, wood, paper, cloth, pencil and ink on linen
69.96 x 182.88 cm (24 x 72 in)

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Her work might hang on a wall, but it pushes itself outwards into the world, disrupting the space around it as well as the process of making art itself.
— Caroline Roux, Financial Times

Building a vocabulary of recurring personal motifs – from roses and breasts, to ponds and mud, totems, screaming faces, grapes, scrawled words, cherry trees and moons, pumpkins and sunflowers – Snyder develops a complex materiality through an additive process of collaged materials. A symphony of dried plants, burlap and straw are caught in the flow of paint – an eclectic approach to materiality that is closely aligned with the artist’s feminist sensibilities.

Painting at the Pond, 2024
Oil, acrylic, paper mache, burlap, rose petals and buds, straw, paper and ink on canvas
137.16 x 167.64 cm (54 x 66 in)

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Often formed by pouring paint directly onto the canvas, the ponds in Snyder’s recent work emulate deep pools of water seen from above. Art historian Susan L. Aberth connects the motif to Snyder’s impulse towards mysticism, describing the ponds as ‘nature’s scrying mirrors’.

Come to Pearl Pond, 2024
Oil, acrylic, burlap, paper mache, poppy pods, rosebuds, dried flowers, straw, paper and ink on canvas in two parts
121.92 x 121.92 cm (48 x 48 in)

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Written across the walls of this career-spanning show is a lifetime of emotions and feelings, of memories and experiences, in big bursts of shape and colour.
— Time Out

The diptych-like structure of Deepest Spring (2024) sets up a series of dialogues across its two halves; between figuration and abstraction, collage and paint, symbolism and formalism. The diptych format – with its religious art-historical references – casts the painting as a kind of personal reliquary in which Snyder's own repertoire of motifs and materials takes on a heightened, mystical resonance.

Deepest Spring, 2024
Oil, acrylic, paper mache, burlap, rose petals and colored pencil on canvas in two parts
127 x 152.4 cm (50 x 60 in)

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Selfie (2024) evokes the photograph taken of and by oneself using a phone camera; a self-portrait. The painted figure gestures to her daughter's stick-figure drawings that influenced the artist in the 1980s. The face, with its mouth stretched open, recalls the screaming head that appeared in the same decade as an expression of grief and rage. Recontextualised here within the bouquet of roses that comprise the figure’s head, the motif takes on new meaning. Its expression has softened, and it is perhaps a song that bursts forth from its open mouth. The form of the figure is echoed by that of a weeping cherry blossom tree to its right. Instead of the barren lifeless trees that populate Snyder’s works from the 1980s, here she offers us the hopeful image of a tree in full bloom.

Selfie, 2024
Oil, acrylic, paper mache, rose petals, mud, paper and pastel on linen
137.16 x 198.12 cm (54 x 78 in)

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