New Publication: Joan Witek: Paintings from the 1980s
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
Excerpt of essay written by curator Jason Andrew
I first met Joan Witek in the Fall of 2003 while coordinating an exhibition of her work at the Kouros Gallery. During a visit to the studio, out of the storage racks, Joan pulled Las Meninas (1980-81). When I inquired as to other paintings from the period, she pointed rather embarrassingly to a tall thick roll wrapped in plastic leaning in the far corner of her studio. Intrigued, it has been my desire to re-present this body of work since that time.
The impact of seeing Las Meninas was resounding. Its surface was unlike anything I had experienced. A thin slightly visible blue chalk line laid out the horizontal composition. Thick black marks made with oil stick layered in regularity, and graphite applied to the surface to temper the level of light.
Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Black and White Squares No. 1, 1948 Oil and enamel on linen 24 1/8 × 30 in. (61.3 × 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Photo: Diego Flores, courtesy Barbican Centre. © 2020 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Known for reductive, even geometric abstractions, it was curious to learn that Witek’s compositions, all of them, originate from a single narrative source. “The painting expresses my Spanish flair,” she told me. Witek’s father was Spanish, and as she described in her studio notes, “the title first came to me and I didn’t know what it was—eventually discovered it was Velázquez’s title.” Her notes continue: “Associations with me: Spanish / the Spanish love of black / named after the women who cared for the princesses at court—my being a woman / Spanish.”
The repetitiveness and regularity of Witek’s works seemingly link her to Agnes Martin. However, Witek’s approach—the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning and the initiation of actions and proceedings—categorically moves her past Minimalism and closer to that of Process Art. In this regard, Witek shares a sharp sensibility with her peer the sculptor Jackie Winsor who described the origins of her work, “These things of mine certainly aren’t minimal. They’re not reduced to the most elementary things. The focus is not the cleaning up of abstract expressionism.”8 The same can be said for Witek.
Memories of Underdevelopment (1981), acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1983, was the painting that followed Las Meninas. Titled after the Cuban film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968), Witek’s studio notes indicate that she first responded to the subject through “organic” drawings in 1968, predating the painting. Having seen the film again on television, she noted “how much of a portrait [the painting] was of me.”
“I’ve always wanted to make incongruous things go together: like squares being portraits,” she once said, “In the 1970s the square was so important. The square as a square was not enough for me. I loved its containment but I wanted the square to be filled.”
That Witek sees many of her works from this period as self-portraits is astonishing—the clarity of a mark and its interpretation as figure / personality.
Joan Witek, Edward Teller’s Dream, 1982, Oil and graphite on canvas 68 1/2 × 119 3/4 in (174 × 304.2 cm)
Introductory Glyph (1982) references her passion for Pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphs. This towering painting features at its center a single emblem glyph. Tall and sculpted, the totemic offering mimics an ancient stela whose carved glyphs give the reader a sense of place, situation, or setting for the telling of an event or history. “This fits perfectly with my hieroglyphs and their decipherment,” Witek said describing this work, “There is a constant language throughout waiting for that decipherment.”
In her review of this painting exhibited at Rosa Esman in 1984, Lowery Stokes Sims deciphers the painting this way:
The different proportions of the glyphs became imbued with specific meanings that carry into other paintings […] in Introductory Glyph the expanse of the central glyph, surrounded as it is by twelve registers of regularly placed strokes (larger ones on the bottom two rows), creates a decidedly negative space (a compositional black hole) that literally pulls the space dramatically back into the center. To counterbalance this effect, and to achieve a visual electricity that is comparable to that of the diamond-shaped interstices between the bottoms and tops of the rows of glyphs, Witek places a jagged edge down the center of the large glyph.
Edward Teller’s Dream (1982) is a unique subject for Witek as it makes use of the traditional association of black with death. The genesis of the idea for the painting is fully described in her studio notes about having seen the Teller documentary called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb:
the subject… is the emptiness of the vast ‘field’ of vertical four-inch strokes. Here, hopefully, opposites operate and after the vastness is realized, the backup is the tenseness of all those uninterrupted strokes. The painting needed to be ten feet to create that emptiness.
Emptiness is experienced through the repetitive architecture of Witek’s strokes,—what the artist once referred to as “geometrically common destiny”—a bundle of which stack up like a tomb at the bottom center of this painting. And we are right to read the painting this way, as searching for the structure of the composition, Witek studied the architecture of Egyptian funerary tombs.
