Joanne Greenbaum

Joanne Greenbaum is an artist who lives in her studio. [...] Instead of Warhol’s cool Fordian mass production, the one-person Greenbaum factory creates singular, unique works of organized chaos. For example, the repetitive scrawled doodle marks evident in some works suggest a hand neurotically filling a coloring book at pace, while the broad-brushed, casual painterly gestures aspire to bring a discrete tentacle shape into focus. Alongside these opposing attitudes are drips, scumbled brushstrokes, melting puddles of color, and discontinued architectonic shapes, all of which playfully jigsaw together a bigger picture that hints at degrading logic and systems—as if Greenbaum were changing thoughts midstream. Adding to this disorderly impetus is the range of media she works with, including paint, ink, Flashe, marker, oil stick, and pencil, which are all often combined in the same space.
The tension created by this seemingly automatic mark-making sits at the juncture of drawing and painting—that is, between the structuring logic of line versus the emotive suggestion of color, which in another era would have been construed as the struggle between the intellect and the romantic. This edginess could also be construed as embodying the persistent heat of city living—the city being an analogue to the factory in modern life. [...] Ultimately, though, Greenbaum’s ebullient outpouring can best be characterized by a single word: gleeful. (abridged version of Sherman Sam in: Artforum International online, March 29, 2014)

Joanne Greenbaum, born 1953, is a New York based artist.