Barbara Grad

Grad is often highly influenced by her environment.[18] For a three-year period in the late 1970s, she commuted from Indiana to Chicago in a small plane, drawing aerial views on the trips. The imagery found its way into her work—and continues to—in ribbon-like bands of modulated color and patterning that suggested landscapes and plant forms, which she sometimes combined with geometric shapes, as in the painting, Trails (1978). This work, which she exhibited at Artemisia and Jan Cicero Gallery, included paintings and mixed-media pieces that sometimes incorporated weaving.[11] After moving to New York in 1979, Grad began explored imagery from her new surroundings—cityscapes, street life, pinball machines, the figure—in more representational paintings that she exhibited at 55 Mercer Gallery in New York and Jan Cicero in Chicago.[9]

Barbara Grad, Fruit of the Vine, oil on linen, 48" x 72", 1996.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Grad returned to nature, and eventually, abstraction, influenced by her commutes to Boston and move to more pastoral Wayland, Massachusetts in 1991. Art historian Bonnie Grad (no relation) wrote that this new work "transports viewers to a primordial natural world of incipient becoming."[22] Her first solo exhibition in Boston (Bernard Toale, 1996) was a synthesis of her travel and nature experiences and her sophisticated integration of abstraction and referential imagery.[3][8][23] These new paintings, such as Fruit of the Vine (1996), employed autumnal washes of loose, patchwork grids that formed fractured, Cubist pictorial spaces, onto which she layered lyrical, rhythmic plays of biomorphic shapes, resembling seeds, pods, ferns or branches about to blossom or fruit.[8][24][25] She unified the compositions by overlaying heavy, map-like white and black line work suggesting tendrils, vessels and honeycombs, which brought the organic forms into focus.[23][3][24]

Critics noted the work's lush depths and handling of paint, which appeared both spontaneous and controlled.[8][24] Artforum's, Francine Koslow-Miller compared the "primitive stylizations and pictographic lines" to the work of Adolph Gottlieb.[8] Nancy Stapen of ARTnews wrote that the work recalled the "circular, fertile forms" of Lee Krasner and "the lyricism of Arthur Dove and the impassioned vision of Marsden Hartley," but marked Grad's shift in emphasis from modernist essential forms to fleeting depictions of air, light, the passing of seasons, and "nature's ceaseless flux."[3]

Grad has produced drawings, prints and mixed media art throughout her career.[26] Her drawing exhibition at Bernard Toale (2000) featured painterly watercolor and ink works on mylar and paper, that mixed text, abstract shapes and a detailed, "secret" visual language reminiscent of Klee or Miró.[27] Cate McQuaid called it "meaty, satisfying work" that unpeeled like onion skins to reveal layers of subtle, translucent organic forms and ideas involving spirituality and consciousness; others described the pieces as challenging "koans" enacting an uneasy truce of nature and geometry.[28][27] In the Boston Center for the Arts traveling group show "Standing on One Leg" (2005–8), Grad exhibited mixed-media works, such as Balancing Balls (2005), and incised etchings on plexiglass. The etchings, which featured diagrammatic drawings of human figures, architecture and hieroglyphics, were placed off the wall, creating a subtle play of ephemeral line and shadows.[29][30][31] Critics and curators described the explorations of primal myths, belief systems and the body's relation to the cosmos as playful, clever and intriguing.[29][32][33]

Grad has also produced more than seventy artist books.[16][34][35] In 1996, she exhibited the "Origins" series, which features small "dreamscapes" that unfold in accordion formats, echoing the layered abstraction of her paintings.[8] Between 2002 and 2004, she created a socially oriented series of books, including Random Data and Enemy Territory (made as America entered the Iraq War), that incorporated abstract heads and figures, text, numbers, and diverse forms and materials such as eggshells and boots.[16][34][35]

Barbara Grad, Plan B, oil on linen, 94" x 60", 2011.

Grad's later paintings have grown more dizzying, disorienting, dense, and expansive in their themes, which reference topography, maps, city grids and borders, the built environment, ecology, and the layering of cultures, one upon or next to another (e.g., Erosion, 2008; Greenspace, 2009;[36] Re-Build, 2012[37]).[12][2][1] Critics describe works such as Plan B (2011) as "fabricated from a virtual reality high in the sky," "far outside reality," yet convincingly real.[4][21][17] They situate them alongside cultural representations such as the Nazca Lines of Peru, Serpent Mound in Ohio, or crop circles reflecting the "ancestral need to take a bird's-eye view, the better to locate oneself on the planet."[4][17]

Grad has described her later work (e.g., Salt Air, 2018) in terms of collisions—of colors, forms, patterns, perspectives and meanings—a notion reinforced in her multi-canvas works, which abut different-sized painted panels to create a sense of unstable, disjointed perimeters.[12][38] John Yau relates Grad's carefully developed, "splintered pictorial space" and ability to maintain a continuous tension between defined sections and the overall image to the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn.[1] Others cite the tangled abstractions of Terry Winters, but note in Grad's flitting between the tangible and evanescent, a greater emotional register that expresses the difficulty of navigating complex communication, geographic and psychological divides.[4][39]

Barbara Grad, Salt Air, oil on linen, 108" x 60", 2018.