Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980's (2020)
Published on the occasion of Joan Witek’s solo exhibition Paintings from the 1980s, organized in collaboration with Artist Estate Studio LLC, at MINUS SPACE, 2020.
Introduction by Matthew Deleget; Essay by Jason Andrew
Design by Peter Freeby for Artist Estate Studio
Printed by danny luk at arcoiris nyc, inc.
Published by Artist Estate Studio for MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2020
68 pages, softcover, color
11 x 8.5 inches / 28 x 21.6 cm
ISBN: 978-0-578-76802-1
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joan Witek (b. 1943, New York, NY) has used the color black for much of her life as an artist. While appearing to be straightforward, there is a persistent language of proportion and meaning in her abstraction. Black is usually considered the absence of color. It is severe, rigorous, and associated with emptiness and repression. But as Lilly Wei has written, “Witek plays these oppositions in her work: black being ascetic and alluring, meditative and expressive, flawless and flawed, fierce and demure, a distinct unequivocal presence, yet subtle, elusive.”
Joan Witek lives and works in New York City. Her select solo exhibitions include Jason McCoy Gallery, Outlet Fine Art, Atea Ring Gallery, Bartha Contemporary, Kouros Gallery, CDS Gallery, Wynn Kramarsky, John Davis Gallery, and Rosa Esman Gallery.
Recent group exhibitions include Positive, Negative at Massey Klein Gallery (New York, NY); Crossroads: Carnegie Museum of Art’s Collection, 1945 to Now at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA); Painting Black at Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst (Soest, Germany); Black & White: Modern and Contemporary Positions at Jason McCoy Gallery (New York, NY); Kunstmuseum Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus (Soest, Germany); Drawn / Taped / Burned: Abstraction on Paper at the Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY); Black and White at Galleri Weinberger (Copenhagen, Denmark); Sammlung Schroth, Kloster (Wedinghausen, Germany); and Bartha Contemporary (London, UK).
Her work can be found in many prominent public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
