Joan Snyder

Roxy Red Fugue

The grid in Roxy Red Fugue fades, expands, drips, and is ultimately subverted by painter Joan Snyder. Known for her stroke paintings in the 1970s, Snyder transitioned from formal techniques of abstraction and grew interested in complex materiality. Her canvases favor painted words and symbols and found objects like glitter, twigs, or fabric fixed to their surfaces.

Recalling feminist ideas of the 1970s, Snyder aptly chose the logic of the grid for interrogation, a recurring motif of the men-centered minimalists of the time. Snyder achieves this counter-narrative in Roxy Red Fugue, in which she embeds gestures of her dynamic hand and gendered material into the painting.

In 1992, Snyder wrote: “I believe that women artists pumped the blood back into the art movement in the 1970s and the 1980s. We were making…art that was personal, autobiographical, expressionistic, narrative and political.”