Light As Space

MARUANI MERCIER is honored to present Light As Space featuring the work of three American artists: Marina Adams, Joanne Greenbaum, and Anne Truitt. This is the second group show organized for the gallery by New York-based curator Raymond Foye, who explains, “Contemporary art is inextricably linked to context and precedence. One of the pleasures of a group show is examining the connections, influences, and reverberations of artistic circumstances.” The title of the exhibition is taken from Anne Truitt’s description of her work, with its connotations of luminosity, colour, and volume.

Marina Adams (b. 1960) synthesizes a wide range of influences in her work, from music to architecture to textiles. Although working in a non-figurative mode, physicality and movement are integral to her work. While Adams achieves great lyricism, every painting is nonetheless a record of a struggle, calling to mind the work of Joan Mitchell and late de Kooning—often cited by Adams as important influences. The artist’s strong commitment to the important social role of art in furthering progressive values remains a fundamental inspiration, and integral to her notion of artistic expression. Marina Adams’s work was first exhibited by MARUANI MERCIER in Brussels in 2022 in a group exhibition curated by Raymond Foye (Structuring Light: Marina Adams, Paul Mogensen, & Joanna Pousette-Dart).

Joanne Greenbaum (b. 1953) has been an important painter in the lineage of the New York School, a tradition of studio-based painting where the work is the result of direct engagement with self, authenticity, and human existence. “To me, painting is limitless; I don’t need to ironically quote modernist styles or modes of abstraction,” Greenbaum has said. Born in New York City, Greenbaum spent her teenage years in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, drawn to the work of Picasso, Matisse, and Sonia Delaunay. About her work Raymond Foye has noted, “Energy, integrity, and rebellion are essential to Joanne Greenbaum’s paintings, which always confront the viewer with a difficult and restless beauty.”

Anne Truitt (b. 1921- d. 2004) was an American sculptor whose work bridges color field and minimalism, while belonging to neither. Truitt’s sensibility drew from disparate sources: her friendship with Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland, her love of Marcel Proust, and three years in Japan (where her husband was Bureau Chief for the Far East for Newsweek). She exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961—1973 (December 19, 1973—January 27, 1974). In recent years her work has been exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and Dia Beacon. Today she is recognized, along with Agnes Martin, as a pioneering and independent spirit in abstract art in the twentieth century. Truitt’s penetrating intellect is documented in Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt (2023: Yale University Press), and four volumes of journals and daybooks. The artists in this show remind us that the values of freedom begin on the most personal level; they also remind us that developing a personal aesthetic and insisting on its legitimate place in the world is part of the struggle of the artist. Each of these artists have found a way to harmonize colour, light and structure into complex visual music that resonates across time.