Joan Snyder: Love from an Abstract Artist

2 Sep-4 Oct 2025

Overview

Love from an Abstract Artist is an exhibition spanning over six decades of American artist Joan Snyder’s work on paper. Featuring nearly 50 new and historical works, dating from the mid-1960s to the present day, it bears witness to the important position drawing has always held in Snyder’s practice. Often diaristic and autobiographical, these varied works encompass Snyder’s grids, symbols, landscapes and strokes, and incorporate collaged materials including fabric, rope, berries, herbs and hand-pressed paper pulp, among others. Snyder has continually expanded the possibilities of drawing. Her works on paper are, as the American critic and art historian Faye Hirsch writes, ‘independent and self-sufficient objects’. Love from an Abstract Artist follows the artist’s first solo exhibition, Body & Soul, at Thaddaeus Ropac in London in 2024. 

Snyder is recognised for developing a new, distinctly embodied language of abstract painting at a time when legacies of Abstract Expressionism loomed large and Minimalism espoused new conditions of sterility and mechanical facture in American art. In this male-dominated climate, she dissected the ‘anatomy’ of painting to its constituent parts and, in the mid-1970s, began adding personal motifs to her work such as bodies and breasts, vulvas and hearts, totems and fields of flowers. ‘It seemed to me that in order to go forward, I had to push back hard,’ she reflects. ‘To again embrace ideas that were at the very foundation of all my thinking about painting – about structure, about application, about meaning, about materials.’ The earliest works in the exhibition including Stripes/Mounds and Green Strokes (both 1968) reveal how drawing offered the artist a framework, outside of painting, through which to deconstruct its most fundamental elements. ‘My drawings are the skeletons upon which I plan to add muscle and bones and flesh,’ she has said. Presenting a series of reduced marks – blobs, lines, stripes and strokes – these works contain the pictorial discoveries that would catalyse one of the artist’s major bodies of work, the Stroke paintings. 

Five important drawings from 1970 capture Snyder’s deepening interrogation of mark-making as a type of notation, as she begins to explore the dualities that now define her work: that of figuration and abstraction, logic and feeling, planning and impulse. In Marks and Strokes, scribbles and dashes of brightly coloured oil pastel, watercolour and graphite dance over graph paper, as though the grid – with its potent associations of Modernist art and its discourses – is a system in whose fixity she rebels. Similarly, in Untitled (1970 series 1_2), thick strokes of dark-pink watercolour are arranged in horizontal rows that smudge and bleed across pencilled lines. Organising structures recur throughout the exhibition as Snyder considers the autonomy of the gesture within a strict formal context, and how a painterly mark might animate a surface like the written words on a page or musical notes on a stave. ‘Throughout Snyder’s entire oeuvre, the grid functions as a metronome,’ the curator and art historian Jenni Sorkin writes, ‘a device of precision, a tempo upon which to rely, or, conversely, to transgress.’

Behind Snyder’s work on paper, and her practice at large, is a descriptive, autobiographical impulse: ‘[I] tell my story with marks and colours and lines and shapes,’ she says. ‘I speak of love and anguish, of fear and mostly of hope.’ Many of the works in the exhibition are diaristic, including Summer 6/12 and Summer 6/14, two watercolour sketches made a couple of days apart in June 1983. Their stippled landscapes loosen and dissolve into abstractions, and in the former, an opaque, blackened heart hangs low on the horizon like a sun, reflecting the artist’s unique ability to fuse subjective feeling with representation. The complexity of Snyder’s drawings develops over the chronology of the exhibition, as her early experiments in elemental forms make way to increasingly dense and layered surfaces. A series of paper-pulp works shows the artist’s near-sculptural approach to the medium, including Ancient Radar (2013), which is affixed with additional sheets of leopard-print fabric. ‘As with other materials and images to which she returns periodically, Snyder keeps building on her past applications of paper, altering its role and developing new associations through it,’ explains the art historian and curator Sarah Anne McNear. 

Language plays an important part in Snyder’s art-making, where it is applied like an additional material, layered and deconstructed. While her early works are often annotated with details about structure, line and colour choice, since the mid-1970s Snyder has combined text and image for both formal and narrative effect. Throughout the exhibition, sprawling handwritten and painted words seem to capture fragments of the artist’s voice, which is at times poetic and at others confessional, grief-stricken, playful, deadpan or enraged. Dear Molly, Maggie, Mira (2015) is a visual letter addressed to the significant women in Snyder’s life that begins with emotionally written words and slowly blooms into four painted roses. In You Bastard (2016), disordered letters seem to scrabble and fight for coherence against a lattice of overlapping handprints. 

By resisting legibility, Snyder invites us to consider language beyond its referential meaning, to see it instead as another graphic mark or embodied gesture. In Don’t Try to Read This (2025), one of the most recent works in the exhibition, Snyder playfully acknowledges this resistance, scrawling the titular words along the lower edge of the composition. The work which lends the exhibition its title, Love from an Abstract Artist (2025), is also ironic. Composed almost entirely out of words, it further complicates the idea of drawing as an exclusively pictorial mode of representation. The artist presents us with a list that is an inventory of personal motifs: buds, grapes, ponds, roses, herbs, faces, hands, bodies, trees, flowers, breasts, totems, strokes and moons. Her signature, ‘LOVE FROM AN ABSTRACT ARTIST’, serves as a valediction and nods to a semiotic game where list-making becomes mark-making, and mark-making, in turn, becomes abstraction. ‘It is the absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder,’ writes the art historian Hayden Herrera. ‘Because the message is conveyed through abstract language as well as through images and words, self-exploration never becomes trivial self-display.’