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Joan Brown, 'Model with Reflection,' 1972.

 

Joan Brown, Model with Reflection in Window, 1972.

Acrylic, ink, and graphite on paper, 36 × 24 inches.

Our exhibition of works on paper by Joan Brown was reviewed by Donald Kuspit for the January/February 2021 issue of Artforum. Kuspit provides a detailed and insightful analysis of Brown’s drawing practice, considering both the artist’s personal history as well as her place in the art-historical canon. He notes, "The eighteen works featured at George Adams Gallery—done primarily in ink, acrylic, and graphite—highlighted a major turning point in the artist’s career: namely, the transition Brown made from creating heavily impastoed and expressionistic figurative paintings to producing flatter and more stylized depictions of women—images that are implicitly self-referential and, for the most part, nude. Many are conspicuously linear, not to say deftly Minimal, among them Figure #13, Figure #25, and Figure #39, all 1970—clearly “breakthrough” pieces in their utter eschewal of luscious painterly facture."