Joan Snyder

First coming to prominence in the early 1970s, Joan Snyder received her initial recognition for her ‘stroke paintings’, which were a method through which to break down and reconstruct the history of Abstraction in painting. She achieved her elegantly gestural ‘stroke paintings’ by employing the grid as her starting point. Later into the 1970s, Snyder moved away from the formal qualities of the grid, and began expanding the materiality of her paintings, with the inclusion of text and symbols. Snyder is frequently considered an autobiographical or confessional artist, and her paintings intertwine both individual and collective experiences which she folds into her narratives. Her constant testing of material and technique, and an unwavering individualism, Snyder has broadened the horizons of abstract painting and is an unfaltering source of inspiration for successive early career artists.