Joanna Pinsky is a painter residing in Evanston, Illinois. Working with acrylics, she creates two-dimensional shaped paintings on canvas and gator board as well as rectangular works on paper. She enjoys creating shaped pieces because they have a dynamic presence that gives a greater sense of reality to the objects. The rectangular works enable her to explore a more traditional format along with using the paint to emphasize the unique quality of water color paper.

Early works concentrated on geometry and color to explore perceptual concepts. These evolved into textural works that pitted natural materials such as sand, sawdust and gravel, against geometric shapes leading into large-scale invented shapes inspired by aerial views of landscape. These led to abstracted images of architectural structures including buildings, bridges and viaducts. In 2012, she began creating shapes using gator board, a material that permitted greater flexibility for more complex shapes. With gator board, she focuses on different subjects including architectural fragments, busts of nineteenth and twentieth century heroes such as the Cuban intellectual Jose Marti, Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt and abstracted images of nature. Most recently she is returning to pure abstraction with an emphasis on organic shapes.

Throughout her work, color and surface are of primary importance. The artist layers colors which she then incises to reveal underlying colors. The shaped works play with dimensional spatial illusions.

Pinsky often creates installations with the shaped gator board paintings, hanging them so they seem to interact with each other. Nothing is hung parallel or perpendicular to the floor giving the appearance that the objects seem to be floating in space like memories when you fall asleep at night.

Pinsky has exhibited shaped paintings and rectangular works on paper in numerous solo shows including The Evanston Art Center, Space 900 Gallery in Evanston, Perimeter Gallery and Nancy Lurie Gallery in Chicago, the Koehnline Museum of Oakton College in Des Plaines, IL; ArtWorks in Waukegan, IL and A.I.R. Gallery in New York City. Her work has been seen in national and international group exhibits in Hanover, Germany, Syke, Germany; Osaka, Japan; the State of Illinois Building in Chicago, The Illinois State Museum, Springfield; the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Rockford College Gallery, Rockford, IL,; Shidoni Gallery, Santa Fe, N.M. and exhibits in Minneapolis, MN, and Louisville, Kentucky. She is a member of Space 900, an artists’ collaborative in Evanston.

Pinsky’s work is in many private, corporate and museum collections including the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Il, Oakton College, IL, Millikin University, Decatur, IL, Honeywell, Inc., Minneapolis, Sandoz Corp, Des Plaines, Il, the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Com Ed Community Center, Chicago, Northwestern University Dept. of Mathematics and the Loyola Medical Center, Maywood, IL. She has received feature articles in the Chicago Tribune, Crains Chicago Business and Pioneer Press, and her work has been reviewed in New City Art, Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-times, The New Art Examiner and Pioneer Press. Her work is included in the book, The Chicago Art Scene, by Ivy Sundell, Crow Woods Press, 1999. Pinsky has a B.F.A. from Cornell University where she majored in painting and studied art history.

Pinsky is a co-founder and Artistic Director of Art Encounter, a non-profit education organization dedicated to educating, empowering, and connecting people of diverse ages and backgrounds through interactive encounters with visual art.
See www.artencounter.org.