Joanne Robertson at SANDY BROWN

Joanne Robertson’s three large-format oil work maintain the room at Sandy Brown, the place the effusive high quality of their vibrant, loping tangles appears to open up the Berlin gallery’s tiny storefront. Swathes of blue in subtly various hues type a thread between Daybreak, Howl, and Final Solar (all 2022), every of which conveys a state of tentatively resolved chaos. These are fairly work. There’s something earnest about their consideration to the emotive potential of complementary colours, as within the gentle orange and fainter purple that appear to rise to the floor in opposition to kinetic blue and yellow marks in Daybreak, or the immediacy of the thick, daring brushstrokes, accentuated by their distinction with stretches of clean canvas, in Howl. Possibly Robertson has intuited that there’s room for sincerity nowadays and that gestural abstraction will be buoying.

Paying homage to Joan Mitchell’s calligraphic clusters and astute use of the colour white, Robertson’s works additionally resonate with the late American artist’s articulation of portray as a “means for feeling ‘dwelling.’” The method of creating these works was interrupted—and inflected—by childbirth, an intense, embodied expertise that Robertson painted, partially, to transmute. Sinuous traces in Howl and black wisps in Final Solar unravel corporeal contours, whereas fleshy tones and dashes of crimson and brown make up the amorphous shapes of Howl. Removed from an abstracted anatomy, nevertheless, it’s the sense of improvisation guiding these work that connects them so indelibly to the physique, as they manifest the each day dance of intuition, instinct, and all the opposite noise by which one navigates the world.

— Camila McHugh