Joan Reutershan (CV)

Joan Reutershan makes boldly colored collage and assemblage paintings inspired by the cacophonous Brooklyn streets she experiences every day. Her themes are the 21st Century tensions between chaos and design, digitality and materiality, and sense and nonsense.  She received her BFA summa cum laude from Hunter College, City University of New York, where she was a Kossak Painting Fellow.  She earned an MA Degree in Art History, also from Hunter College. 

Reutershan’s recent solo exhibitions include BKNY Street View at One River School of Art and Design (2020, Woodbury, NY), with a redux at the Mariboe Gallery/ Swig Arts Center (2020, Hightstown, NJ).  Prior one-person venues include the Florida School of the Arts Main Gallery (Palatka, FL), and Gallery Three at A.R.T. New York (Brooklyn, NY).  She frequently exhibits in group shows, at The Box Factory in Bushwick/Ridgewood (2022), 550 Gallery in Long Island City (2021), and online with Artsy through Odetta Digiral Gallery/ Shim Art Network. She is represented by Office Space Gallery SLC, and her work was featured with the OSG SLC at Art Fair 14C in Jersey City in 2021 and 2022.  She lives in Brooklyn and works in Long Island City, NY.

Artist Statement

My cityscape paintings present with snarky fluorescent color and fragmented urban iconography. Each painting begins with an overall silver silkscreen pattern, which I associate with the seductive intrusion of the internet on the contemporary landscape and psyche.  Acrylic paint, found objects and glittery down-market plastics fight back with their insistent materiality.  Collage and assemblage objects extend my work out from the surface into low relief, and off the stretched canvas onto the wall. My cityscape imagery eschews the vertical plane, and draws form the street and sidewalk—from graffiti, connective urban design, and detritus. Visual references range from high modernism to comic books and memes.  I admire painters who elevate the quotidian, from the Dadaists to Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Murray and Amy Sillman. 

Making art is a form of epistemology for me, it is a way I explore the 21st Century urban environment--our edgy cauldron of discrepancies, contradictions, but also of transformation. If the downtown sky is colonized by big real estate, “on the ground” I find plenty of alternative world building in which I actively participate, and which I consider research for my art work. The wacky, energetic jumble of my painting queers the urban landscape, not by depicting scenes of lifestyle or identity, but by bursting the conventions of cityscape structure (stacked ground, architecture and sky planes) and replacing them with a layered mixed-media assemblage—discrepant, inconsistent, and inclusive. My work is a confabulation that provokes and reimagines.