Joan Thorne

Since the 1970s, Joan Thorne has dedicated herself to pure painterly abstraction, playing with form and color in exuberant paintings and works on paper. She came of age in downtown Manhattan during the 1960s and ’70s, carrying the banner of abstraction and action painting forward against the rise of conceptualism, and she was a participant in the 1981 Whitney Biennial and the last iteration of the Whitney Annual. The critic Ken Johnson wrote of her work, “Optically captivating, the work conveys a state of visceral and cosmic ecstasy.” Thorne’s paintings reveal a keen, if unconventional, use of color and understanding of scale, employing moderately sized canvases as the grounds for broad, energetic brushstrokes that spiral and sprawl across bold fields of colors.