Inner Space

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Howardena Pindell. Opening Thursday, October 24, 2024, the exhibition surveys the artist’s career-long explorations of the fraying boundaries between the deep sea, space, quantum mechanics, science fiction, and microbiology.

A concurrent exhibition, Howardena Pindell: Deep Sea, Deep Space, will be on view at White Cube Hong Kong from November 20, 2024 through January 8, 2025.

Pindell’s Video Drawings of 1975 capture still frames from TV programming. In each unique chromogenic print, the television screen is overlaid by transparent acetate marked with an abstract system of lines, numbers, arrows, and dots. The underlying imagery—including astronauts, UFOs, aliens, and celestial bodies—is tinged with technological optimism and terror. Paradigm-shifting advances in science, technology, and mathematics frequently propel humankind into territories that are surreal, strange, destabilizing, and revelatory. The historic series of Video Drawings represents the artist’s earliest experiments with photography, as well as her first attempts at combining both figurative and abstract imagery. The gallery is pleased to present a selection of photographs from the Science Fiction series.

The same system of symbols covers her Astronomy drawings (2000–2008), which seem to trace the movement of celestial bodies through time. Charting the stars was of magical and practical significance for millennia: Pindell’s abstract use of symbols—inscrutable yet suggestive of technical meaning—points to the importance of all that is still unknown about their movement.

In the early ’70s, Howardena Pindell began spraying paint onto canvases through hole-punched cardstock, forming layers of dots, creating a sensuous interplay between background and foreground. In her new Deep Sea and Tesseract series, the dots seem to spontaneously organize into compressions and rarefactions. Like her earliest experiments with the technique, Pindell sets her colored dots against a solid background: warm and cool colors dance past each other, creating depth, movement, and dimensionality. Occasionally, vibrant and iridescent color bursts through, evoking bioluminescence and celestial combustion in pure abstraction. In Tesseract #25 (2024), light radiates from a glowing green orb at the center of the painting, revealing elemental forms suggesting both microscopic and astronomical scales. The strange spiraling shapes could be galaxies, microorganisms, or even subatomic string particles.

During Pindell’s residency at Dieu Donné, the artist has embraced papermaking techniques as a way of circumventing the conventional treatment of the material as a two-dimensional surface, enabling an interplay of fore- and background, between subject and media. In Comet (#98) (2022), Pindell constructs a large oval out of hundreds of hand-drawn embedded paper dots. The work’s recursive character—circles within circles—echoes the artist’s implicit comparisons between celestial and atomic scales, and the microcosmic nature of the cosmos.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a position at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked for 12 years (1967–1979). She held the role of Exhibition Assistant in the Department of Circulating National and International Exhibitions, before transitioning to the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, where she worked as a Curatorial Assistant, Assistant Curator, and finally as the Associate Curator and Acting Director. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she is now a full professor.

She is the recipient of the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America, an honorary degree from The Maryland Institute College of Art, the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2019 Artist Award, and a 2019 Archives of American Art Medal from the Smithsonian Institution.

Most recently, Pindell’s work appeared in: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (2006, The Studio Museum in Harlem), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–1978 (2009, Seattle Art Museum), Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston), Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (2015–2016, Museum Brandhorst; 2016, Museum Moderner Kunst) and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017, the Brooklyn Museum, New York). In 2018, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago mounted Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, which traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2018) and the Rose Art Museum (2019). In 2022, she was the subject of another major exhibition, Howardena Pindell: A New Language, which opened at Fruitmarket (Edinburgh) and traveled to Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), Spike Island (Bristol), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin).

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell.