For the 2018 edition of the Dallas Art Fair, Garth Greenan Gallery presents a group exhibition of paintings and works on paper by gallery artists Victoria Gitman, Howardena Pindell, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. All three artists balance representation with abstraction but differ widely in their practices.

The exhibition includes three paintings by Gitman, which highlight her recent move from works like On Display (2010)—stunningly realistic oil renderings of beaded vintage handbags—towards the meticulous abstractions based on supple fur surfaces, like her two untitled paintings from 2017. Each composition is tightly cropped, further intensifying both the haptic quality and the inherent sensuousness of the artist’s chosen subjects. In her own words, the works are “small, modest, delicate—qualities traditionally characterized as feminine in Western art—but their extreme display of virtuosity becomes a gesture of immoderate proportions, or self-asserting might.”

Howardena Pindell’s Untitled (1971) achieves similar sensuousness and depth. Layers upon layers of dark chromatic dots create interlacing constellations. Pindell’s two paper works, Untitled #1 and Untitled #4, both 1974, achieve depth with a different approach. In both works, punched paper dots, suggestively numbered or marked with vectors, are suspended in a matrix of handmade paper—some faintly visible beneath the translucent ground, others oating delicately on its surface.

The concentrated and complex surfaces of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Montana Memories: Salish (1988) and Montana Memories: Aspen (1989) are strong counterpoints to Gitman and Pindell’s works. Each of the large-scale paintings is separated into a distinct composition of rectangles, which Smith describes as a reference to the boundaries of the Indian reservations created and enforced by the U.S. government.

In Montana Memories: Aspen, black organic forms advance and hover over the divided picture plane in pictographs representing a horse, sh, and vase, superimposing the artist’s personal and cultural memories over the divided landscape of Montana. Each canvas is a partitioned mix of memory that includes the darker legacy of cultural contact and conflict, reminding the viewer that each moment of reverie also includes a reference to loss.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Victoria Gitman, Howardena Pindell, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.