Strobia

“An equivalence is set up between the diversity of scale in the referential abstraction and the techniques utilized. The ‘meaning’ of the painting rests on this equivalency.”

Nancy Graves graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 1964. Five years later, her career was launched when she was the youngest artist—and only the fifth woman—to be selected for a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the early to mid-1970s, she focused on assembled sculpture that referenced fossils, bones, and animals, and late in that decade, she returned to painting. She created quasi-abstractions in bright colors, culling from documentary nature photographs, NASA satellite recordings, lunar maps, and other scientific data. Strobia is an example of this.

Graves’s research-oriented approach was prescient, as many artists today mine data and technology as a basis for subject matter. Though strobia is not a word in English, a strobe is a lamp capable of producing a brilliant burst of light. A stroboscope is a device for studying the motion of the body. Bursts of light and physical movement seem to come together in this fluid and energetic painting.