ANN PIBAL / BIO – EXHIBITIONS – WRITING – CONTACT – @ANNPIBAL

Greater New York
P.S. 1, MoMA, Long Island City, NY
March 13 – September 26, 2005

Mario Naves, The New York Observer /

Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times /

“Ann Pibal works primarily in painting and drawing, using thin acrylic on aluminum panels or on mylar. Coming to terms with the legacy of Color Field painting, she has developed a vocabulary of geometric abstraction based on color and line. Reminiscent of Minimalism in their simple geometric shapes, her meticulous abstractions nevertheless vibrate in intense tones of blue, green, orange, and vintage rose that often recall the palette of contemporary home decor and fashion. If Pibal’s color-based abstraction can be linked to the work of such artists as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, her art nevertheless oscillates between the natural and the artificial, inspired both by landscape and pop culture. In this respect, color for Pibal bears a social value: it is not an absolute element, a pure essence, but it relates to a specific context – the world of urban and domestic design. yet her seemingly objective bands almost obliterate the memory of the context from which her inspiration and her colors come, attaining an almost futuristic quality. while one could think about her work in relation to the optical effects investigated by figures such as Bridget Riley, Pibal is not interested in pure optimality. Rather, somehow managing to merge Pop art and Op art, she finds her inspiration in such products as CD covers and cookie packages.

In a subtle tension between flatness and dimensionality, stacked stripes of yellows, greens, and pinks often rise up and bend in an orange field. At other times her paintings and drawings tend to evoke the horizontality of landscapes. The artist often repeats linear color sequences within parallel bands, creating innumerable variations. Through their relationships, colors create a context for themselves, while the use of acrylic accententuates the sense of an absolute chromatic field. Subtle doublings and symmetries of colored geometric shapes and bands often animate her paintings and drawings. Pibal’s work, usually very small and intimate in format, explores what the artist calls ” a perpetually unstable future,” making visible the generative space between beauty and failure.

– Francesca Pietropaolo