Back to the Future: The Paintings of Louise P. Sloane

Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the retrospective exhibition of Louise P. Sloane’s fifty-year (and counting!) career:  Back to the Future: The Paintings of Louise P. Sloane. Works from 1976-2022.  This exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Lilly Wei.

The works in this exhibition, dating from 1976 to 2022, offer a holistic view of Sloane’s career and creative transitions. Evident throughout is a fixation on patterns, geometry, and language. With a keen interest in materials that had the ability to diffuse colors and produce a luminous surface texture, early explorations (1975-1989) were defined by works composed of beeswax mixed with pure pigment powders. This molten beeswax “paint” would be applied in three layers to a supported substrate.  Using a stylus, the three layers of “paint” would be scored with a grid pattern.   A hot palette knife was pressed into each square of the grid, fusing the layers of wax together and resulting in an undulating surface texture. This created texture as an aesthetic conceptualization of language;  the markings always reading from left to right, suggesting writing.  This early use of mark making became the hallmark of her painting surfaces throughout her career.   As Sloane states, her paintings are structured by her fascination with the way the brain registers written language, color, movement, and spatial relationships. 

The inflexibility of the beeswax caused certain disadvantages that encouraged Sloane to move on to acrylic mediums, paints, and pure pigment powder by 1988/89. These works, today considered to be her “signature style,” were divided into rectangles or squares and covered in patterns, scraped and rubbed surfaces, comprised of abstractions of written words from various texts. Inspired by a conversation with Richard Anuszkiewicz, Sloane shifted to the use of bright and vivid optically charged color in her works. The texture patterning of her paintings morphed into the transcriptions of personally significant texts for the first time. The text is not meant to be legible, but instead sensed by the viewer, imbuing her paintings with an emotional personal truth. Narrative is treated more as a process than content in Sloane’s works. When it comes to process, Sloane finds use with a variety of tools, most notably a pastry tube with which she adds her writing to her works. 

Back to the Future: The Paintings of Louise P. Sloane. Works from 1976-2022 will be on view from September 12th - October 26, 2024. There will be an opening reception on September 12th from 6-8pm. The gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10am-6pm.