Joan Snyder’s Body & Soul (1997–98) is one of those paintings that photos don’t quite do justice to. Perhaps it’s to do with how the rectangular canvas is divided into discrete sections, all teeming with texture and exuberant detail, defying you to flatten them into a single image. The top and middle thirds contain a series of painted and collaged rectangles: a block of teal with paint dripping from the base; a piece of leopard-print fabric, the backdrop to a red-lipped open mouth; a white-ish field dotted with pink and green, and so on. Occasional details, such as a sparkly pink scribble, cross from one section to the next.
In the bottom third, meanwhile, are two pictures. On the right is a choppy seascape, and on the left, a woman laying naked on her back, legs spread apart. In lieu of a fig leaf, Snyder has affixed a bunch of plastic grapes to the canvas.
“Body & Soul” is also the title of Snyder’s debut exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in London—a survey of more than 30 pieces spanning the American artist’s six-decade career, open through February 8, 2025. (The gallery announced European and Asian representation of Snyder, in collaboration with New York gallery Canada, earlier this year.) The painting’s title made a fitting choice, Snyder told me when we sat down for an interview ahead of the opening. The work, with its eclectic mix of abstract and figurative elements, is itself “kind of a little retrospective” of the various phases and preoccupations of her career.
While not as widely known as she should be, Snyder is a highly respected painter: She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship in 2007, and has enjoyed museum shows at venues including the Jewish Museum in New York. But her route into art was not the most straightforward. As a child, born to a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey, she was never taken to any museums or galleries. She did a bit of painting as a teenager—“mostly copying magazine covers”—before studying sociology at Douglass College. Then, in her senior year, she signed up for an elective art class. The instructor remarked that her paintings reminded him of German and Russian Expressionists, particularly Alexej von Jawlensky. “It was like speaking for the first time,” Snyder said. “I sensed that I could express my feelings through paintings in a way that I had never done before.”
Although her parents were not happy about her abandoning her plans to become a social worker, Snyder went ahead and rented her first studio, painting in the mornings while working part-time jobs. Despite her lack of training, she managed to convince the art department at Rutgers University to admit her into its graduate program. “I put a bunch of paintings in my car, drove up, knocked on the door, and asked if they would look at my paintings,” she recalled. The earliest work in the Ropac show—a moody, quasi-abstract scene entitled Grandma Cohen’s Funeral Painting (1964)—is from this period. There are also a couple of her early “flock” paintings, made using crushed rayon (with a “flocked” texture) and featuring biomorphic forms that gesture toward the female body.
Snyder’s first major breakthrough came later that decade, though, when she realized she could isolate her colorful, gestural brushstrokes as forms on the canvas. These “stroke” paintings began to attract considerable attention in the early 1970s, with a spate of gallery shows in New York and a laudatory essay by the influential curator Marcia Tucker in Artforum. “It was overwhelming for me,” said Snyder, who—with her then-husband, the photographer Larry Fink—decided to flee the claustrophobic Manhattan scene for a farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
Snyder was also “becoming a little bored,” as she put it, with the stroke paintings. Alongside her own work, she had been involved in a number of feminist projects in the art world: She was the founding curator of the (still ongoing) Women Artists Series of exhibitions at Douglass Library, and a member of the Heresies collective in New York. Now she began to explore women’s experiences in her paintings too, and to develop what she calls the “female sensibility.” For Snyder, this meant embracing emotional and autobiographical content, craft techniques, and maximalist style—all things that flew in the face of the austere Conceptualism then dominating the (mostly male) mainstream.
In the decades since, Snyder’s work has remained rooted in the personal, while drawing on an expansive array of expressive tools. She tends to begin with sketches, which she then translates onto the canvas. Recurring elements include lines of text and embedded three-dimensional objects. In the triptych Love’s Deep Grapes (1984), for instance, a quote from Virgil is etched into a woodblock on the right-hand side and printed on canvas on the left. Other works feature rose petals, clumps of straw, and bits of lace. These are dispersed among painted figures, landscapes, and abstract shapes, often rendered as simplified forms in gestural brushstrokes. The isolated stroke is also a continuing motif, although no longer the sole focus. “The strokes are like the notes in music,” Snyder told me, “while the other imagery I use is like the lyrics.”
The comparison is a helpful one: Music is crucial for Snyder, who always has something playing on a CD while she’s painting in the studio, which she still does every day, from 9 a.m. until 1 or 2 p.m. “I will listen to a piece over and over,” she said. “It helps me move, it energizes me.” The exhibition at Ropac features eight substantially sized paintings, all made since the beginning of this year—including one, Selfie (2024), which she finished after all the others had been shipped to London. Near the center of the canvas is a stick figure whose open-mouthed face is made up of thickly encrusted blobs of pink. You can still smell the paint.
“It’s incredible for me to see all this work together,” said Snyder of the career-spanning show, which is billed as her most comprehensive outside of the U.S. to date. A handful of the historic pieces have been borrowed from private collections—this is Snyder’s first time seeing them for years. Most, however, have come directly from her own stores. “I’ve held onto quite a few of them for dear life,” she said. “But I’m about to be 85 and so I had to talk myself into it. And here they are!”
