I wanted more in a painting, not less… to have a beginning, a middle, an end, joy and sorrow, and even resolution… to be able in one painting to have all of this. — Joan Snyder

Marking Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac London will stage the most comprehensive presentation of the American artist’s work outside of the United States to date. Over her career of six decades, Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction, infusing her art with autobiography as she consciously worked against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. ‘I wanted… to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex,’ she has explained. The result is a pioneering body of work that breaks down social, aesthetic and material hierarchies to assert the place of feeling and female subjectivity within contemporary abstraction. As art historian Hayden Herrera writes, ‘It is this absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder.’