Howardena Pindell on her first solo exhibition in the UK

Held at Victoria Miro Mayfair (5 June–27 July 2019) Howardena Pindell’s first solo exhibition in the UK included abstract paintings and collages drawn from two distinct periods in the artist’s career: large-scale spray paintings from the early 1970s; and smaller wall-mounted three-dimensional works completed since 2007. In this film, the artist responds to seeing her works installed at the gallery and the themes and processes behind their creation.

The large-scale paintings on view were completed during the early 1970s, when Pindell was first living in New York after having completed her studies at Yale. These were incredibly innovative years for the artist. In 1967, her graduation year, Pindell accepted a job at MoMA, in doing so becoming the first black woman to be appointed to the museum’s curatorial staff. In 1972, she was a founding member of the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery, subsequently exhibiting at the gallery in 1973 and 1983.

Created while holding down a full-time job, and often at night, Pindell’s spray paintings of this period were made by the artist using as templates discarded cardstock, manila folders and heavy watercolour paper, from which holes were then punched. Spraying paint directly through these perforations, and repeating the process across her large-scale canvases, Pindell arrived at a series of sublime abstract works that are by turns smoulderingly intense and shimmering with light.

Each investigates themes of control and chance that have been of interest to the artist since the beginning of her career. Through the repeated action of paint, her serried ranks of dots, grid-like in essence, become endlessly shifting in their overlays, supporting myriad fluctuations of light, tone and colour. A kind of pointillism freed from the burden of figurative description, these energised, optical fields, which read as predominantly of a single hue from a distance, up close unfold as a series of shifting sensations. Rigorous yet ethereal in appearance, they are endlessly engaging.

Collage has played a key role in Pindell’s art since the 1970s, her engagement with the paper chads that result from the hole punch process emerging organically from the process of creating her spray paintings. These small circles of paper or card were incorporated into her painting process as early as 1973. Later, Pindell began building up the punched out dots on the canvas, sometimes adding other materials, such as a sprinkling of glitter across the surface, too.

Attached to wire armatures, or mounted on board, the circles and ovals she corrals into service in these recent works, some punched out of colourful drawings created by the artist over several years, abut and overlap, with many individual parts standing on their edges, bursting out of the notional picture frame. While the grid format remains present in a number of works, the forms of these layered, detailed works tend towards the amorphous, creating dynamic tension between aggregate and whole.