Table of Contents

‘I don't think of my paintings as “maplike” at all, but a lot of people do,’ says Joanne Greenbaum. ‘I think of the canvases as more of a still-life space: a table, a structure, shelving, a stairway. The paintings become a record of their own making. I like the idea of stepping back and letting the information seep into my brain.’ Table of Contents is a vivid example of her hybrid painterly style, at once intuitive and deeply thought out. Boxes and angles in blue, red, pink, purple, orange and yellow are stacked into a complex stepped network of form; surrounded by solid blackness and framed against a white background, they contain scattered numbers, gesturing at graph or system without yielding to any coded meaning. Greenbaum works from the premise that ‘there are two types of drawing: one is almost like analytical cubism, where I’m trying to figure out structure, figure out context. I need that scaffolding to work on. The other kind of drawing is almost like a physical negation of that. There’s this bodily wiping out. But I think it’s possible to do both simultaneously, at least for me. You don’t have to be one or the other, you can be both. You can be structured and loose at the same time. You can be serene and angry at the same time. Those things all work together, it’s not like you’re one or you’re the other. I think my paintings and drawings really speak to that without being schizophrenic.’