Joanne Freeman

Joanne Freeman is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York. She does minimalist, reductive paintings and artworks on paper, with abstract shapes, neat contours and vivid, striking,and gestural marks. Freeman studied at the University of Wisconsin, where she obtained a Barchelors Degree in Fine Arts in 1976. She obtained a Masters degree in Fine arts from the New York University in 1981. She taught painting and drawing at the University of New York and at the New School for Social Research. She worked as artist and guest speaker at the New York studio School and at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Freeman is strongly influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus School, which focus on the combination of ideas and techniques of art, architecture and design. She strives to represent new shapes in a simple way. She is also influenced by the aesthetics and the graphics of the last century. The neat contours found in several of her works represent the well-defined shadows created by the sunlight on the buildings. She admires the works of reducer artists such as Ellworth Kelly, Paul Feely and Kenneth Noland.

Freeman paints gouache on Khadi, an indian paper made by hand from long fibers of cotton. Her work is illustrated by bright colors, geometric shapes, neat lines and curved gestural marks painted on white backgrounds. Freeman creates a reducing visual language that represents urban symbols and signs, architectural models and the interaction of shadows and light.

Freeman's creative process consists on covering areas with adhesive tape to create sharp edges, and combine these controlled areas with spontaneous marks. The scale of her pieces and the marks that she does are all dictated by the extent of her physical scope. The resulting images express physical reality, emotion, limitation and chance, all this combined with a precise and minimalist aesthetic.

Freeman has exhibited her work a lot in galleries and museums, in solo and group exhibitions, in the United Stated and abroad. Her pieces are part of numerous corporate collections, including those at The Prudential, Readers Digest, and at the Museum of Art of the University of Maine, and private collection, including those of Gail Stavitsky, curator of collections and exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, and Andy Summers, fuitarist of the group, The Police.