Howardena Pindell

Victoria Miro presents an exhibition of recent works and large-scale paintings from the 1970s by Howardena Pindell, the gallery’s first presentation since announcing representation of the US artist, and Pindell’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Howardena Pindell is recognised as a leading contributor to contemporary dialogues around the social and political urgency of process-driven art. The works in this exhibition are abstract paintings and collages drawn from two distinct periods in the artist’s career: large-scale spray paintings from the early 1970s; and smaller wall-mounted three-dimensional works completed since 2007. A focus on Pindell’s pursuit of abstraction gives rise to thematic symmetries within and between the works, which, despite having been completed decades apart, reveal the extent of her ongoing formal analysis and material innovation. In addition, the exhibition’s focus underlines a preoccupation with the grid and the circle, which have been mainstays of Pindell’s enquiring, vital art over the past five decades.

The paintings on view were completed during the early 1970s, when Pindell was first living in New York after having completed her studies at Yale. These were incredibly innovative years for the artist. In 1967, her graduation year, Pindell accepted a job at MoMA, in doing so becoming the first black woman to be appointed to the museum’s curatorial staff. In 1972, she was a founding member of the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery, subsequently exhibiting at the gallery in 1973 and 1983.

Created while holding down a full-time job, and often at night, Pindell’s spray paintings of this period were made by the artist using as templates discarded cardstock, manila folders and heavy watercolour paper, from which holes were then punched. Spraying paint directly through these perforations, and repeating the process across her large-scale canvases, Pindell arrived at a series of sublime abstract works that are by turns smoulderingly intense and shimmering with light.

Each investigates themes of control and chance that have been of interest to the artist since the beginning of her career. Through the repeated action of paint, her serried ranks of dots, grid-like in essence, become endlessly shifting in their overlays, supporting myriad fluctuations of light, tone and colour. A kind of pointillism freed from the burden of figurative description, these energised, optical fields, which read as predominantly of a single hue from a distance, up close unfold as a series of shifting sensations. Rigorous yet ethereal in appearance, they are endlessly engaging.