5 Major Summer Gallery Shows in Paris - 1 of 5
1. Joan Snyder · Earthsongs
Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais · 6 June – 25 July 2026
Earthsongs is Joan Snyder's first solo exhibition in France -for an artist who was a defining figure of the American feminist art movement in the 1970s, whose work is in the collection of major American museums and has been exhibiting consistently in the last 60 years - a fact that says less about the artist than about how risk-averse the European art market gatekeepers are. At 86, Snyder is making the most materially laden and emotionally complex work, and this new series demonstrated an exceptional confidence and maturity in her lifelong pursuit of abstraction.
Her work carries an unmistakably feminist charge – warm color palettes, expressive, visceral, and spiritual all at once. The new canvases incorporate all sorts of materials that have feministic connotation - dried flowers, twigs, mud, straw, burlap, lace, glitter, papier mâché, velvet, poppy pods, rosebuds, and wooden balls - and raised here to the dignity of serious painting. Snyder layers these materials with interwoven colours and fragments of text, each canvas feeling simultaneously like a story being told, a poem being composed, and a symphony being scored. The effect is dense with lived experiences.
Snyder has spent six decades perfecting her very personal and visceral language of abstraction. She has gone a long way from her seminal “Stroke paintings” in the 70s, which were brush strokes of varying sizes and colors painted on a grid (the favorite geometric form of the 70s), thereby subtly challenging the male-dominated movements of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and later her fearless incorporation of auto-biological elements with material experimentation.
The confidence visible in these new works is not only the confidence of age and experience - it is the confidence of someone whose conviction is so strong that has simply outlasted the doubts against her.
Collector note: Snyder holds a MacArthur Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her institutional standing in the US has outpaced her market recognition in Europe. That gap is closing with Ropac's commitment to staging her first solo show in France, after her first one in the UK in 2025.
- reviewed & photos taken by Hilary Tsui, Founder CityTransit Arts | Art Advisor & Curator
