Joan Snyder Body & Soul

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

Marking Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac London will stage the most comprehensive presentation of the American artist’s work in Europe to date. Over her career of six decades, 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, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. ‘I wanted… to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex,’ she has explained. The result is a pioneering body of work that breaks down social, aesthetic and material hierarchies to assert the place of feeling and female subjectivity within contemporary abstraction. As art historian Hayden Herrera writes, ‘It is this absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder.’

Featuring more than 30 new and historic paintings, the exhibition traces the evolution of the artist’s practice from 1964 to the present, culminating in eight major new works. Encompassing the guiding principles and themes of her practice, Snyder’s oeuvre is structured around the development of three foundational groups of work: the Stroke paintings – with which she first garnered widespread recognition at the beginning of the 1970s when they were presented in the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1972) and the Whitney Biennial (1973) – the Symphony paintings and Field paintings. Their visual language extends into her expansive body of paintings beyond these categories, recognisable in her most recent works. Arranged chronologically, a pattern of recurring personal motifs emerges throughout the exhibition in a cyclical rhythm of return and renewal, encompassing love, joy, grief and desire expressed through colour, form and gesture in rich, poetic compositions.

The painting that gives the exhibition its title, Body & Soul (1997–8), encapsulates an overview of the artist’s varied modes of working. Body and soul becomes a metaphor that brings into dialogue the figurative and the abstract, the painterly and the material, the gestural and the controlled – ideas that reverberate throughout the artist’s wider oeuvre. For Snyder, painting is an expression of feeling in which diaristic autobiography and raw emotion intersect with rigorous formal investigation. ‘I have to really act the thing out physically right on the canvas,’ she says. ‘It’s happening while it’s happening.’ 

The Stroke paintings dissect the brushstroke – the most fundamental of painterly gestures – to explore the ‘anatomy of a painting’ through brightly coloured bars that dance across her canvases. In 1971, Marcia Tucker, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, wrote that ‘[Snyder’s] work… has everything to do with the nature of painting itself, both as a process and as a visual language.’ In important early examples on view, including Whole Segments (1970) and Little Yellow (1971), strokes of vivid colour and controlled drips of paint play out in themes and variations across loose grid structures, inviting the viewer to follow their sequence like a narrative.

The earliest work on view, Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting (1964), marks the artist’s burgeoning interrogation of the relationship between representation and her approach to abstraction. Depicting either a huddled group of mourners or a body laid out for visitation in thick, black brushstrokes set against a dense cream background, it is as much through the gestural swathes of paint as the subject matter that Snyder conveys the emotion of the scene. Her Flock paintings of the same decade constitute imaginary inner landscapes, hinting at human anatomy and women’s sexuality through colour and material, rather than symbolic representation, to centre what she calls ‘the essence of feelings of a female body.’

The vocabulary of motifs and symbolic imagery that emerged in the 1970s, beginning with her strokes, continued to develop over the subsequent decades to find enduring resonance in the artist’s later works. Trees and flowers signify cycles of life, death and rebirth, casting nature as an expressive vehicle for the most fundamental of human experiences. The natural world takes on a transcendental quality in Snyder’s paintings, as if body and soul are entwined with the earth, the trees, the sky. In Lovers (1989), the bodies of two women glow in peachy tones against a black night sky peppered with flowers to offer a surreal scene rich in feeling and desire. Other works align the natural world with the sublime or the spiritual, such as The Orchard / The Altar (1986), with its painted ledge running along the bottom, as if a shrine meant to accept votive offerings.

Reimagining this natural imagery within an abstract visual language, the artist’s Field paintings were inspired by the agricultural landscapes surrounding her studio in Eastport, Long Island in the 1980s. The canvas is cast as a site of experimentation that is simultaneously a plane for abstract mark making and a muddy field planted with beans, weeds, pumpkins, breasts and celestial bodies, as in Moons in Mudfield (1989). Elsewhere, screaming heads throw open their mouths in existential howls of pain, while bodies, breasts, hearts, wounds and roses speak to fleeting moments of sensuous bodily experience.

In paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, these symbols are brought into dialogue with material experimentation in full-blown maximalist compositions. Straw, plant stems, seed pods, twigs, rose hips and dried herbs are collaged with silk, burlap, beads and, as in Love’s Deep Grapes (1984), even plastic grapes in a nod to the wry humour that surfaces frequently across Snyder’s work. The imagery, painted gestures and materiality of these works give way, in moments, to language. Scrawled, overlapping and partially obscured, the handwritten text stands as its own form of mark making – an outlet for raw emotion when ‘there’s no other way to say what I want to say.’

The most recent body of work on view, created in 2024, revisits and reimagines the concerns that reverberate across the decades of Snyder’s practice. ‘I am looking back because, needless to say, everything here somehow relates to things I’ve done before,’ she says. Impasto roses, straw, controlled drips of paint, breasts and bared teeth, mud and lace sit beside written dedications to literature and family members. Ponds emerge as a central motif in several works, including Painting at the Pond (2024) and Come to Pearl Pond (2024). Poured directly onto the canvas, dried flowers float in pools of paint, which symbolise portals that traverse the natural, human and spiritual realms in moments of alchemical transformation. This new body of work speaks to Snyder’s continued compulsion to engage in painterly experimentation. ‘My painting is my religion,’ she reflects. ‘It’s the altar that I go to and it’s where I face myself and find out who I am.’