There’s a mysterious connection between the elements of the universe and the cosmic or physical forces that govern them. Recurring natural structures, from sprawling galaxies to the teeming chaos of underwater ecosystems, suggest a hidden order beneath the apparent randomness. Particles in perpetual motion find harmony when viewed through a broader lens, revealing a continuum that has inspired both spiritual and scientific inquiry. This alignment of forces is echoed across traditional philosophies and beliefs, from the Chinese notion of Dao to the Greek dictum “Panta rei.” Spanning East and West, these ideas eventually gained a foothold in the modern era through the lens of quantum physics, offering a rational glimpse into the infinite.
Howardena Pindell’s decades-long career seems to be an effort to map and capture this secret order of the universe. Her enigmatic works revolve around what remains unseen and unexplained, blending abstract intuition with the rigor of scientific observation. Moving fluidly across media, her practice often feels divinatory, combining elements of mystery with a precision that recalls the logic of natural systems.
A career survey, now on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, provides an invaluable look at Pindell’s rich and diverse body of work. She stands among a trailblazing group of African American abstractionists—including Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten and Frank Bowling—who, for too long, were sidelined by the dominant narrative of postwar abstraction. Recently, however, these artists and their ilk have begun receiving the recognition they deserve. Pindell’s approach to abstraction, in particular, is deeply spiritual rather than purely expressive, rooted in a personal and enigmatic symbolic system. Her work seems to trace the connections, links and central forces that hold the universe together, offering a profound meditation on the nature of existence.
For millennia, gazing at the stars for guidance was a shared practice across cultures. Howardena Pindell’s Astronomy drawings (2000–2008) reawaken this tradition, using abstract symbols to chart the universe’s vibrations and tap into an inscrutable cosmic order of energy and meaning.
There’s a deeply ritualistic quality to her meticulous dot system, which recurs throughout her work to bridge the micro and macro cosmos. In the early 1970s, Pindell began spraying paint onto canvases through hole-punched cardstock, creating intricate layers of dots that evoke the perpetual flow of particles from which all matter originates. These compositions create a mesmerizing interplay between background and foreground, blending fictional and physical dimensions. The seemingly abstract patterns poetically reflect the stratified nature of reality, oscillating between human experience and the unseen physical and chemical phenomena that underpin it. Her Deep Sea and Tesseract series, for instance, move through compressions, rarefactions and dissolutions of dots, evoking either star clusters in galaxies or the erratic movement of microorganisms under a microscope.
Pindell’s exploration becomes more tactile in her papermaking works, such as Comet (#98) (2022), where galaxies emerge from hundreds of hand-drawn paper dots embedded into layered surfaces. These works further highlight the multifaceted nature of reality, seamlessly connecting the macro and micro dimensions of the cosmos. Simultaneously celestial and grounded, Pindell’s abstract and tactile approaches suggest a poetic representation of universal orders, inviting viewers to consider the interconnection of realities often articulated in the complex language of quantum physics.
The title of the show, “Inner Space,” adds another layer of depth to these works, suggesting that they can also be read as inner landscapes. In this way, they reflect an entangled system of emotions and feelings, attempting to align with the universal flows of energy for a more harmonious relationship with the complex interdependence of our surroundings. Notably, many of Pindell’s works from the late ’70s are characterized by an ongoing interplay between destruction and reconstruction, a theme influenced by her experience of memory loss following a traumatic car crash in 1979. Through this lens, the artist not only materializes the forces that seem to govern the universe—forces engaged in an endless cycle of creation and destruction—but also invites viewers into an exploration of the ongoing flow of matter. Pindell’s paintings encourage us to open our hearts and minds to new perceptions, surrendering to the flow of energy that can guide us toward new realms of consciousness and a broader understanding of the phenomena that surround us.
This journey into perception led Pindell toward more functional, sci-fi or paranormal narratives, as seen in her enigmatic Video Drawing of 1975. In this work, the artist selects and captures still frames from television programming, creating an uncanny zoom effect that she then overlays with a symbolic system of lines, numbers, arrows, and dots. This visual overlay once again hints at a deeper reading of reality, suggesting a system of interconnections and interdependence between the mundane realm of human events and the universal forces that govern the spatial and temporal dimensions in which they unfold.
Both destabilizing and revelatory, “Inner Space” requires time to fully process. Yet, as an insightful survey of Howardena Pindell’s practice, it showcases the ambitious and visionary visual language she developed—one that constantly blends abstract and figurative imagination, science and fantasy, to translate the undeniable, continuous flow of energies that animate everything, from the celestial to the atomic scales.
Howardena Pindell’s “Inner Space” is on view at Garth Greenan through December 13.
—Elisa Carollo