Joanna Pousette-Dart

[7][8][9] Critic John Yau writes that her shaped canvasses explore "the meeting place between abstraction and landscape, quietly expanding on the work of predecessors" (such as Ellsworth Kelly), through a combination of personal geometry and linear structure that creates "a sense of constant and latent movement.

[22][23][5] Pousette-Dart studied art at Bennington College (BA, 1968), then heavily tilted toward the post-painterly, 1960s abstraction advocated by Clement Greenberg and faculty such as the Color field painters Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons.

[33][6][4][25] Robert Pincus-Witten and John Yau suggest that her work extends the modernist vocabulary into new territory through its reimagining of the straight lines, idealized shapes and rigid rectangular format of hard-edged abstraction.

[7][10][5] Barbara Rose describes Pousette-Dart's shaped canvasses as developing out of a "poetic sense and personal reaction to sensory experience," which renders them unique in their emphasis on movement and the creation of a panoramic spatial continuum;[1][25] she and others distinguish this more intuitive, eccentric approach from the more programmatic strategies of other shaped-canvas proponents, such as Frank Stella.

[5][3][34][2] Ken Johnson has described Pousette-Dart's early artwork as focused on a dualistic tension "between the architectonic, rectilinear structure of the panel and grid and the freely expressive, space-evoking possibilities of painting.

[42][43] Untitled, Dark Edge diptych (1993–6, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is a representative and transitional work of this period, featuring two curved-side-down hemispheres, thickly painted grounds and Japanese calligraphy-like gesture.

[25][4] The paintings generally feature two or three interlocking or nesting planes, conjoined horizontally and stacked large-to-small or small-to-large, whose dynamic arrangement suggests a world never fully at rest (e.g., Untitled (Cañones #3), 2007–8).

[10] She furthers these effects with her use of thinly applied, subtly modulating colors within shapes and across panels—light to dark or warm to cool—which suggest a relationship between light and form associated with the natural world rather than formalist or decorative concerns (e.g., Plateau, 2019).

[50][51][1] The Brooklyn Rail's Barbara MacAdam characterized that show's work as visceral, cerebral and widely allusive, conveying cultural references to the American Southwest, Europe, the Far East, and ancient and modern art without specifically describing anything.