Body & Soul represents the most extensive showcase of Joan Snyder’s work in Europe to date. For Snyder, painting serves as a vessel for profound emotion, where personal introspection meets disciplined formal exploration to create works of deep transcendence. Spanning six decades, her career has redefined the narrative possibilities of abstraction, blending autobiography into her art in a way that defied the male-centric traditions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and Colour Field painting.
“I wanted… to do something else, something much more intense, personal, and complex,” Snyder reflects—a sentiment that resonates through the layers of raw emotion and intricate storytelling present in her paintings.
The exhibition features over 30 new and historic paintings, tracing the evolution of Snyder’s practice from 1964 to the present, culminating in eight major new works. Her early pieces, such as Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting (1964), mark the artist’s burgeoning interrogation of the relationship between representation and abstraction. In the 1970s, Snyder’s Stroke paintings dissected the brushstroke—the most fundamental of painterly gestures—to explore the ‘anatomy of a painting’ through brightly colored bars that dance across her canvases. These works invite viewers to follow their sequence like a narrative, reflecting Snyder’s desire to imbue her paintings with a beginning, middle, and end, encompassing joy, sorrow, and even resolution.
Her 1980s and 1990s works bring symbolic imagery 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 even plastic grapes, adding layers of meaning and texture. 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.”
Amazingly, Snyder’s newest paintings are among her best. It’s as if she’s stopped trying to officiate a battle between figuration and abstraction and is just letting everyone have at it. There are flowers and screaming mouths, scrawled words and drips of color, thick sculptural mounds of paint, and big washes of red. They’re bubblegum pink gardens, toxic dripping landscapes—the sight of someone brilliant doing whatever they want to do. These recent works speak to Snyder’s continued compulsion to engage in painterly experimentation. As she reflects, “My painting is my religion. It’s the altar that I go to, and it’s where I face myself and find out who I am.”
Whole Segments, 1970
Body & Soul encapsulates Snyder’s varied modes of working, bringing into dialogue the figurative and the abstract, the painterly and the material, the gestural and the controlled—ideas that reverberate throughout her wider oeuvre. For Snyder, painting is an expression of feeling in which diaristic autobiography and raw emotion intersect with rigorous formal investigation. As art historian Hayden Herrera writes, “It is this absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder.”
This exhibition not only showcases Snyder’s pioneering body of work but also asserts the place of feeling and female subjectivity within contemporary abstraction. It is a testament to her lifelong commitment to creating art that is intense, personal, and complex, breaking down social, aesthetic, and material hierarchies to offer a deeply moving and thought-provoking experience.
You can visit the exhibition at London’s Thaddaeus Ropac until Februrary 5, or check it out online.
Header: Wild Strokes Hope, 1972, courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac
