After spending so much of the quarantine year interfacing with the flattened spaces of computer screens, I am anxious to rebuild the “muscles” used for close, sustained looking. Two works that I find compelling—and quietly subversive—can be found on the second floor of the modern and contemporary wing. Hanging right across from each other, Joe Goode’s Torn Cloud Painting and Dorothea Rockburne’s Saqqarah address reference, abstraction, and process. Each artist zeroes in on the painting canvas as an object to be manipulated rather than the surface that disappears under illusionistic colors and forms. Goode’s piece is two canvases layered atop each other; one is torn to reveal an underlayer. The jagged cuts come off as urgent and at odds with the calming blue tone. Rockburne folds gesso-ed canvases into precise geometric shapes that sit subtly off the wall. Look closely and you will see how she completes the work by marking the wall itself and claiming the architecture as connective tissue. I appreciate how Goode and Rockburne push the concrete qualities of materials and process into abstract realms of thought and feeling. Next time you go by on your way to the glowing Dan Flavin and the exuberant Frank Stella in the adjacent gallery, I hope you will pause and take a little time with these two.
—Sara Krajewski, The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Joe Goode (American, born 1937), Torn Cloud Painting, 1975. Oil on canvas. Museum Purchase: Funds provided by the Contemporary Art Council, 2007.15.
Dorothea Rockburne (Canadian, active United States, born 1932), Saqqarah, from the series Egyptian Paintings, 1979. Oil, gesso, and graphite on linen. Museum Purchase: Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, 83.2a-h.
