Nancy Genn is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural Californian artist who is a major contributor to the history of post-war American art in the fields of gestural abstraction and abstract expressionism. She is known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, prints, and, notably, handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
Genn is currently in an exciting and productive stage of her career, creating new, large-scale paintings and works on paper in her studio in Berkeley, California. This work was featured in her most recent exhibition, Nancy Genn: Inner Landscapes at Marignana Arte, Venice (April - July, 2021). This major solo show was curated by Francesca Valente and included the publication of a beautifully illustrated catalog.
Genn has a long history of engagement with Italian culture, having been selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome four times between 1989 and 2015, where she was inspired by ancient and contemporary Italian culture and the Mediterranean light. This culminated in the extensive retrospective exhibition Architecture from Within (2018) at Palazzo Ferro Fini, Venice, Italy, which included a comprehensive monograph Architecture from Within (Francesca Valente, Skira Milan, 2018).
Genn’s most recent work, the Rainbars and Waterfalls series of paintings and work on paper, use translucency and fluidity to explore the element of water, often featuring a blue palette rendered with loose, painterly brushwork on a horizontal grid.
Genn’s mature works reveal themselves as spiritual mantras, suggesting the serenity and discipline of Eastern philosophies and cultures. The subdued color palette creates a sort of musical score, a well-orchestrated synaesthetic composition that simultaneously engages eye and ear, redefining human perception. Somehow recalling Japanese architecture, the horizontal grid always lurks in the background, but color drippings on top create a slow, rhythmic vertical downward movement...
Nancy Genn’s images seem to emerge from an alchemical process. They invite us to be in silence and reflect on the vital relationship between humans and nature, demanding a deceleration, or even a suspension in time to be perceived in their wholeness and integrity, and to be distilled within us.
The rarefied architectures of her inner landscapes transcend any reference to the contingent in a dimension in which time and space lose their specificity. Past and present converge. The inner world and the outer world thus become one, inspiring a serene yet passionate harmony born from an archaic sense of wonder at the mystery of life itself.
– Francesca Valente, Inner Landscapes (catalog), 2021
