Nancy Genn

“In his seminal treatise Morphologie Autre published in 1960, the art critic Michel Tapié - curator, among other things, of Jackson Pollock's first exhibition in Paris - proclaimed the end of classicism and championed a new art autre, the art of capturing individual experience from within, in the name of what he termed "the adventure of the spirit". In this text, written after his meeting with the Gutai group and his trip to Japan and North America, Tapié named, as primary representatives of Abstract Expressionism, internationally renowned artists such as Claire Falkenstein, Sam Francis, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Mark Rothko, as well as Atsuko Tanaka and Hiroshi Yoshida, and placed Nancy Genn next to Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Emilio Vedova.

“As one of the most important practitioners of post-war informal art, Genn inhabits an abstract universe characterized by rigorous compositional structures pervaded by a peculiar organic quality. Her first paintings consist of tangles of gestural, densely interwoven brush strokes, as well as fragments of memories which evoke the "white writing" of the American artist Mark Tobey who, like Genn, was a frequent traveler to Japan, where he was deeply affected by Oriental calligraphy. In her works of the 1960s and 1970s - large paintings with flowing cursive lines on translucent canvases, striking for their strength and movement - time and space become irrelevant, losing their specificity and dropping every trace of immediate meaning. The diptych Carnevale di Viareggio - exhibited in 1963 in a solo show at the M. H. De Young Museum of Art, San Francisco - for instance, while its title suggests the artist's here and now presence, is actually only vaguely indicative of such a presence; but is instead deliberately ambiguous. The collapse of chronological time, in a coexistence of past and present, signals for the artist a moment of intersection and metamorphosis in which individual memory becomes absolute abstraction.”

– From Nancy Genn: Beyond the Grid by Francesca Valente, 2023