Description:

Joan Witek
American, (b.1943)
Ghost Picture
watercolor on vellum, 1996
Signed and dated lower right.

Provenance: Acquired from the artist, 1999.

JOAN WITEK (b.1943) has been probing the complexities, meanings, and infinite variety of the color black for her entire artistic life. While appearing to be simple and easily grasped there is an ongoing language of proportion and meaning in this resolve to abstraction. Black is usually considered the absence of color: it is severe, rigorous, associated with death, or depression or repression. But as Lilly Wei has written: Witek plays these oppositions in her work: black being ascetic and alluring, meditative and expressive, flawless and flawed, fierce and demure, a distinct unequivocal presence, yet subtle, elusive.

Recent solo exhibitions include Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest, Germany (2021); Minus Space, Brooklyn (2020); Jason McCoy Gallery, New York ('15); Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn ('14); Kunstmuseum Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus, Soest, Germany ('13); Drawn / Taped / Burned: Abstraction on Paper, Katonah Museum of Art ('11); Black and White, Gallerie Weinberger, Copenhagen, Denmark ('10); Sammlung Schroth, Kloster Wedinghausen, Arnsberg, Germany ('12, '11), Gallery Niklas von Bartha, London ('09).

Her work can be found in many public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (NY), Arkansas Arts Center (AR), Carnegie Museum of Art (PA), Fogg Art Museum at Harvard (MA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (NY), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), and the Yale University Art Gallery (CT) among others.

  • Dimensions: 14 1/2"H x 19 1/2"W (sight), 21 1/2"H x 26 1/2"W (frame)
  • Medium: watercolor on vellum, 1996

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September 24, 2022 11:00 AM EDT
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