Witek at The Armory Show (Sept 8-10)
Joan Witek (b.1943) “Edward Teller’s Dream [P(S)-12],” 1982, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 68 x 110 in (172.7 x 279.4 cm)
SECCI
The Armory Show
Booth 330
September 7-10, 2023
Javits Center
439 11th Avenue
New York City
SECCI will present historic works from the 1980s by Joan Witek. At the center of the installation is the nine-foot painting Edward Teller’s Dream (1982)—a painting inspired by an apocalyptic dream of Edward Teller (1908-2003), known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.”
During the early 1980s, Witek created seminal works that sought a kind of purity—a purity defined exclusively by her singular use of oil stick and graphite on unprimed canvas. Captured in Witek’s singularity is the play among surface, texture, proportion, and edge. Works from this period encapsulate the gesture and expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism into a measured calculated mark. While the look of her compositions may be representative of the cool “what you see is what you get” aesthetic of minimalism, Witek’s approach to abstraction is rooted in expressive narrative sources.
“I wished to reconcile abstraction and feeling,” Witek told John Caldwell, curator of her 1984 survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
“The irony of the work… is in appearing to be simple and easily grasped visually while an ongoing language of proportion and content proceeds through each work. Each painting depends on the others for interpretation. They are a handwriting. Although the writing style is relatively uniform, each picture has a uniquely based origin in my emotions or wherever a particular painting comes from. Its themes are the art of painting, or my perceptions of the world, or the renderings of my insides.”
