Biography of Joanne Greenbaum
Joanne Greenbaum is an American abstract artist noted for her energetic layering of different colors and elements. She is a painter, ceramist, watercolorist, and teacher, known most prolifically for her bright, gestural paintings and small, warped ceramic sculptures. In her large-scale paintings, Joanne Greenbaum overlays irregular shapes, doodle-like lines and architectural forms in a series of spontaneous brushstrokes that build up on the page. This spontaneous technique has informed her work in ceramics, where she impulsively morphs and crafts clay into fascinatingly abstract forms.
Folding, bending and creating uneven surfaces from which she runs different colored glazes, Joanna Greenbaum’s ceramic and sculptural works are a true testament to the fluidity that pervades her artistic endeavors. Misshapen vessels, these works are like three-dimensional drawings and are completely free of a structure, some almost suggesting an anthropomorphic quality. Her work in ceramics signals a refusal to fit into the idea that Conceptual Art is in some way better than the handmade. It allows her to work in a relay between sculpture and painting—each medium influencing her work in the other.
Born 1953, Joanne Greenbaum lives and works in New York. She received a BA in 1975 from Bard College and has been working out of a studio space in Tribeca for nearly 20 years. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Joanne Greenbaum has had solo shows at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, the CCA Andratx in Majorca, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. She has also had group exhibitions at institutions such as MoMA PS1, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum.