User:Colapeninsula/Joan Banach

Joan Banach (born 1948) is an American artist, writer, and curator, and formerly assistant to AbEx painter and printmaker Robert Motherwell. She won a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

She paints using reconstituted oil paint on wood panels, a medium used by Hollywood matte painters to avoid reflections, which gives her paintings a flat light-absorbing quality. Critic Thomas Micchelli notes that her work has many similarities with modernists such as Ad Reinhardt but also has more contemporary pop art qualities: her work "plays a game of quiet seduction by hitting High Art marks while delivering the graphic intrigue of a Mike Mignola dark-on-dark cover for Hellboy or BPRD". Dominique Nahas praised her work for its "Blakean intensity and opulent complexity".

Born in Brooklyn in 1948, Banach studied under Lee Bontecou at Brooklyn College in the 1970s. She has also written on Bontecou's drawings in the exhibition catalog Drawn Worlds.

She formerly worked for artist Robert Motherwell as a personal curator and cataloguer from 1981: she co-wrote a catalogue raisonné of his prints, co-edited The Writings of Robert Motherwell with Dore Ashton, and arranged gallery shows of his work. After his death in 1991, she became secretary of his Dedalus Foundation. She was dismissed in 2008, following accusations that she had taken some of Motherwell's works without proper paperwork, and a dispute within the organisation over claims that the foundation's CEO Jack Flam had wrongly identifying works as being by Motherwell.

She has had solo shows including Citizen at Small A Projects, New York City in 2008.