The New Yorker Reviews Fanny Sanín's Exhibition at Americas Society
The New Yorker Reviews Fanny Sanín's Exhibition at Americas Society
The show is "a great step toward bringing her mesmerizing paintings into wider view," says the magazine in its Goings On section.
The Colombia-born artist Fanny Sanín has lived and worked in New York since 1971, but she has never had a museum survey in the city. Unfortunately, such neglect isn’t unusual for a Latin American woman, but in Sanín’s case it may also be a product of her style: geometric abstraction. She makes colorful, hard-edge compositions of lines and shapes. They’re the kind of paintings that had their heyday in the nineteen-sixties but haven’t been in vogue since (except for the revival of another Latin American woman painter, Carmen Herrera, in the early to mid-two-thousands). Americas Society’s “Fanny Sanín: Geometric Equations” (through July 26), curated by the art historian Edward J. Sullivan, is far from a full-on retrospective, but it’s a great step toward bringing her mesmerizing paintings into wider view. [...]
All this speaks to Sanín’s masterful ability to create harmony out of tension. Her paintings are a delight to look at, with pleasure arising from the complex interplay of colors—say, black against red against orange—or subtle variations in adjoining geometric shapes. It’s no wonder that Sanín makes many preparatory studies, some of which are on display: her work is exacting. But the feat is that it’s also affective—out of meticulousness she creates an abundance of feeling.
