Joan Waltemath

Joan Waltemath’s paintings adeptly conflate architectonic and painterly languages into grid-based compositions, yielding minimalist works that don’t forego evidence of the artist’s touch. Line, form, and color define every inch of each work, and yet, Waltemath creates immense depth at select points on her panels through the application of unique oil and pigment pairings, mixing in zinc, malachite, hematite, dolomite, phosphorescent, and dozens more. This willful engagement of medium purity is what lends each work its permanence, layering and embedding viscous mixtures that take months, and in some instances years to fully set. The heterogeneous qualities of Waltemath’s work are revelatory, illustrated best by the convergence of art and architecture as well as her talent for building a distinct syntax from those vocabularies. Buildings can take years to be completed, from sketch to design, followed by groundbreaking, construction, topping out and furnishing. The human body, likewise, takes years to develop and mature. It is no accident that Waltemath follows a very similar script and timetable when creating each painting.

Joan Waltemath has lived in New York City since the late 1970s. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Baltimore, Portland, London, Basel, and Cologne, among other cities. She has written extensively on art and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Brooklyn Rail and Contributing Editor for artcritical.com. She taught at the IS Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, from 1997 to 2010, and periodically at Princeton University starting in 2000 until 2010, when she was appointed Director of MICA’s L.E. Hoffberger School of Painting in Baltimore, MD. She was named a Creative Capital grantee in 2012. 

Courtesy of Hionas Gallery