Geometry with Feeling: Ida Kohlmeyer in Two & Three Dimensions
January 17, 2023 – July 9, 2023 | Cannon Gallery
This exhibition features the work of Ida Kohlmeyer (1912–1997), most recognized for her role in the vanguard of abstract painting in the American South.
Taking up the brush during middle age, Kohlmeyer quickly developed a distinctive vocabulary of organic and geometric forms that she deployed with often irrepressibly bright colors. While abstract expressionist painting is now fully integrated into the canon of American art, it was a controversial turn for an emerging New Orleans artist in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite this, Kohlmeyer pursued abstraction with an enduring desire to tease out the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of this frenetic approach to painting.
While Kohlmeyer's sculptural work reached maturity relatively late in her career and is often known separately from her painting practice, her forays into the three-dimensional illustrate the rigor with which she continued to pursue a formal spontaneity with effusive palettes, glyph-like patterning, and multi-textured surfaces. Seen here side by side, these two polarities of Kohlmeyer's oeuvre demonstrate an emotive approach to abstraction that refuses to sacrifice the artist's gestural precision. The 'geometry' of Kohlmeyer's work is revealed at the intersection of her persistent experimentation and the deeply felt formal vocabulary she deployed.