Earthsongs

Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents Earthsongs, Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition in France. The exhibition features new paintings and works on paper created over the past year, continuing and extending themes and motifs from Snyder’s six-decade career. The works are described as simultaneously ethereal and grounded, oscillating between the otherworldly and the visceral, and reaffirming Snyder’s position as a pioneer of an expansive yet personal abstraction.

Snyder’s practice, which has been overtly feminist since its inception, merges abstraction with autobiography. Recurring motifs include roses, breasts, trees, and moons, translated into a personal vocabulary of forms. In Earthsongs, this vernacular is materially expressed through a blend of natural and synthetic elements, such as twigs, dried flowers, mud, straw, lace, velvet, glitter, and plastic beads. This collaged approach, described as reflecting the complex fabric of life and the "undocumented materiality of female existence," results in works that are accumulative, bearing the weight of feeling, memory, and the inhabited body.