Joanna Pousette-Dart

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s paintings expand the language of abstraction through shaped, multi-panelled compositions that challenge conventional notions of pictorial space. Working almost exclusively in curved, interlocking forms, she conceives each painting as a spatial continuum in which drawing and structure are inseparable, allowing line to travel fluidly across shifting surfaces while fields of colour offer a sense of luminosity, depth, expansion, and continual motion. Her work is informed by sustained engagement with landscape, particularly its vastness, light, and spatial anomalies, first encountered during extended periods in New Mexico, where she lived and worked intermittently since the early 1970s. Rather than depicting landscape, her paintings explore perception itself—how experience is shaped by movement, duration, and the curvature of vision. Drawing on a wide range of visual traditions including Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy, medieval fresco cycles, Mozarabic manuscripts, Islamic art, and Indigenous artistic practices of the Americas, Pousette-Dart has developed a singular visual language, one that is at once deeply personal and broadly resonant.

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.