One of my favorite female painters is showing at the Hauser & Wirth Zürich gallery in Switzerland. “Joan Mitchell – Sunflowers” runs from June 6 through to July 25.
I like paintings that look like they were fun to paint. Art doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that for me. Concepts and theories come a distant second. If I can’t relate to the painting of a picture, I move on to the next one.
From the exhibition press release..
“Joan Mitchell’s Sunflower paintings count amongst the most experimental and vibrant of all
her works. In the upstairs gallery at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, six canvases dating from the
1960s and the year before her death, etchings and drawings host an extraordinary diversity of
marks with compositions whose ungovernable vitality refuse to comply to the rules of image
making. Mitchell considered sunflowers to be ‘like people’ — subjects to empathise with
whose life cycles were played out with exuberance but brutal swiftness. ‘If I see a sunflower
drooping, I can droop with it,’ she explained, ‘and I draw it, and feel it until its death.’ Like
van Gogh whose precedent she was brave enough to summon, she embraced sunflowers for
their hopefulness as much as for their assertive and undeniable splendour. Her images do not
much resemble the plants themselves: they are blue and red as well as golden, erratically
dancing sweeps of colour that communicate internal as much as external landscape.”
Here’s a link to the Joan Mitchell Foundation too.
Read the original post on the Art News Blog
