Joan Snyder, Earthsongs at Thaddeus Ropac, Paris Marais

Earthsongs is Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition in France. In these new paintings and works on paper, created over the last year, Snyder continues and extends the ideas and motifs that have defined her practice over her career of six decades. Simultaneously ethereal and grounded, the works oscillate between the otherworldly and the visceral, reaffirming Snyder’s position as a pioneer of a vision of abstraction that is at once expansive and profoundly personal. This new body of works is deeply rooted in the artist’s Field paintings, a series that emerged in the mid-1980s in response to the agricultural landscapes Snyder encountered upon relocating from New York City to more rural surroundings. Her all-over treatment of the canvas establishes a creative field in which she sows imagery, colour and gesture to fuse formal experimentation with ideas of mythical and personal cyclical renewal. I am always seeking clarity, a purity, an essence, but have never been willing to sacrifice the ritual, the need for the deep, the rich, the thick, the dark. — Joan Snyder Snyder nurtures a synergy between abstraction and autobiography, with each work forming a diaristic episode in which narrative guides formal investigation. Her practice has been overtly feminist since its inception, rooted in her role as a defining figure of the women’s art movement that flourished in the 1970s. She translates women’s lived experience into a complex and personal vocabulary of forms to which she constantly returns: roses and breasts, trees and totems, ponds and moons. Enquire