Joanna Beall Westermann
Opening: Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

Venus Over Manhattan
120 East 65th Street
New York, NY 10065

(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Joanna Beall Westermann, organized in collaboration with the late artist’s estate. It will be the first solo presentation for the artist in over two decades. A student of Josef Albers and Diego Rivera, Joanna Beall Westermann’s contributions were significant, yet somewhat obscured in her lifetime by her marriage to famed sculptor and printmaker H.C. Westermann. Venus Over Manhattan’s exhibition comprises a group of paintings, drawings, and collages that indicate the pioneering spirit of a quiet and compelling talent. Her works on display contain an original distillation of modernist, expressionist, and surrealist precedents, which Beall creatively reimagined in order to extract from the mundane that which is extraordinary.

Despite her present-day obscurity, Beall’s work remains a masterful traversal of various traditions and a testimony to a life of paradox and mysterious beauty. She shared the sensibility of many artists with strong connections to the Chicago art scene, creating a substantial body of work in an independent and exploratory manner, largely unburdened by commercial pressures. Her art was featured in key Chicago area exhibitions, including Allan Frumkin Gallery. By 1976, she was exhibited in a show of “distinguished alumni” of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago alongside a group that included John Chamberlain, Joan Mitchell, and Leon Golub. She exhibited at significant venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and enjoyed established gallery representation—as of the 1970s, James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles. In spite of these markers of success, Beall’s reticence about her art and her quiet commitment to working in the shadow of her older and more established husband kept her largely out of the public eye. Artist Bill Barrett recalls that, even when introduced to New York art critics “she was reluctant to open up about her work.” Nevertheless, she was known to a small circle of informed collectors who sought out her paintings—including Frank Gehry, Dennis Adrian, William N. Copley, Ken and Happy Price, Ed Janss Jr., and Julien Levy.

The works on display at Venus Over Manhattan evince Beall’s exquisite handling of color, tendency to merge multiple terrains into a single work, and interest in Surrealist techniques, which she deployed to explore the extraordinary realities of everyday life. Yet while Surrealist elements are prominent in Beall’s art, she used them to ends that differ from the original movement’s aims. Paintings in this exhibition quote Magritte’s clouds and approximate de Chirico’s pittura metafisica; but while both Magritte and de Chirico estrange the viewer from banal realities, Beall’s works use these elements to articulate fantastical realities of a complex existence. Her adaptations of formative influences parallel the artist’s own dictum in her contribution to Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color: “To honor the masters creatively is to compete with their attitude rather than with their results, to follow an artistic understanding of tradition—that is, to create, not to revive.”