"The Revolution Will Be Painted," solo exhibition of paintings by Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Christopher Stout Gallery, New York, April 1 to May 1, 2016.
Late in 2014, I wrote an ode to painting making my case for the medium’s enduring expressive power and intellectual reach. To compose my anthem—which is homage to Gil Scott-Heron’s well-known protest rap—I remixed phrases resonating with authenticity cropped from the canon of critical writing about painting. Published in ART21 Magazine it reads in part:
The revolution will be painted.
The painted marks will tell of surfaces
simultaneously combining touch and sight.
In each painting a layer of chaos will show
not everything is fully worked out.
You will see the potential in the speed of the moving line,
the encapsulation and entanglement of shallow space
and the sheer beauty of the painting’s literalness.
The revolution will be painted. [1]
The written piece became an open blueprint for the artwork I subsequently created. I gave the title of my tract, “The Revolution Will Be Painted,” to the suite of wall-sized abstract paintings I made in my North Fork studio over the next 18 months. This body of work was shown in March and April at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City and in two solo exhibitions, one in Washington DC and the other in Brooklyn, NY. Concentrating for long, uninterrupted stretches of time in the country allowed me to identify and dispense with obsolete work habits. Seph Rodney in Hyperallergic responded to my choices noting, “The work is visually enthralling, partly because of the tension between the visual motifs of organic and geometric: the Dionysian bacchanal of nature’s uncontrollable growth and change, and the incursion of Apollonian rigor and theoretical organization; the head vying with the heart.”[2] Ultimately, I found more genuine possibilities in a pared down painting vocabulary focused on color and form.
David Cohen, artcritical editor, wrote of the show at Christopher Stout Gallery, New York, “Six powerful, lyrical at once absorbing and theatrical canvases…hang unstretched like baronial tapestries in a raw white cube in Bushwick.”[3] Since 2012, I have integrated interactive programs of performance and discussion with exhibitions of my paintings. The events I curated within the Brooklyn installation included dance, music and sketch comedy performances and group conversations on literature, art and activism. Another reviewer, Pat Rogers from Hamptons Art Hub, highlighted the connection between my audiences' collective experience and the visual effects in my most recent work, “Possessing a raw and unfinished sensibility is part of the ideology that the paintings contribute to a larger and collaborative creative act.”[4] “The Revolution Will Be Painted” brings together the written word, the unique object and the live event, all of which are intrinsic to my quest to make credible paintings.
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[1] ART21 Magazine, “The Revolution Will Be Painted,” by Anne Sherwood Pundyk, December 22, 2014
[2] Hyperallergic, “The Rebellious Spirit of Paint,” by Seph Rodney, April 28, 2016
[3] artcritical, “ARTCRITICAL PICK, Anne Sherwood Pundyk at Christopher Stout Gallery,” by David Cohen, April 15, 2016.
[4] Hamptons Art Hub, “Moving Paintings Beyond Object: Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s Revolution,” by Pat Rogers, April 28, 2016