Spanierman Modern is pleased to partner with M & M Fine Art in Southampton, NY, to present an exhibition of recent abstract paintings by the artist Louise P. Sloane. The exhibition will be open May 27- June 11, with an opening reception on May 27.

Sloane has been active since 1974, infusing her works with personal text that motivates her own experimentation. The visual language of her paintings continue the legacy of reductive and minimalist ideologies, while celebrating color and the human inclination towards mark making.

Sloane’s detail-oriented works are typically divided into rectangles or squares. The quadrangle has become a repetitive motif, often centrally featured within the context of a grid. In 2019 and 2020, inspired by Hilma af Klint and Kazimir Malevich, Sloane began experimenting with a wider palette and new compositional strategies The rectangles and squares that have historically anchored her paintings have become untethered. These shapes now feel weightless, unbound by the gravitational pull tugging at them from the grid upon which they appear. The buoyancy of these geometric forms creates tension within the rectangular grid, as if they might float off the wall.

In contrast with her iterative geometries, it is important to Sloane that the works present themselves as human made objects. Thick paint constructs repetitive handmade patterns, the physical motion of her brush strokes revealing the humanity of her practice. The surface holds Sloane’s signature extrusions . Painstakingly written and overwritten, Sloane’s inscribed text is a form of private meditation. Turned into a relief, and abstracted through color blocking, the text is interpreted through its physicality, not its meaning.

Contrasting color choices intensify the dimensionality of the surface texture. Sloane uses color straight-up, without mixing. Blending takes place optically, as one color reacts to the other, red against green, or blue against yellow. The elements of mark-making, color, and geometry compete for the viewer’s focus, keeping the eyes and mind in constant motion, unifying her interests in the form of the square.

Sloane’s work has been featured in numerous institutional collections, including the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Cornell Museum of Art and History. Sloane's works are in the permanent collections of the Heckscher Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Yeshiva University Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Sidney and Francis Lewis Collection).