Sylvia Snowden: M Street On White

Sylvia Snowden, Pauline Johnson, 1978. Copyright the artist

Few painters have peered so deeply into the human heart, or proved so adept at divulging its secrets.

– Alice Thorson, New Art Examiner, October 1988

Edel Assanti is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition of paintings by acclaimed Washington D.C.-based artist Sylvia Snowden (b. 1942, Raleigh, North Carolina), organised in collaboration with Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York.

The exhibition features eight large-scale paintings from Snowden’s seminal M Street series, presented here for the first time. The show follows the recent acquisition of Brown, Yellow 11 (c. 1978) by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and Snowden’s inclusion in the Whitechapel Gallery’s 2023 exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70.

Sylvia Snowden’s singular painting oeuvre spans six decades, renowned for her gestural brush marks and densely worked surfaces. Conceived in thematic series, Snowden’s works commemorate everyday experiences of ordinary people. She encapsulates the psychological essence of her subjects: their deliberations, triumphs, angst, and joy are all laid bare. While Snowden draws upon key aspects of the Western tradition of expressionism – giving primacy to colour, gesture and emotion – her work edges consistently toward abstraction, revealing a highly individual style that subverts traditional painterly archetypes.

In the late 1970s, Snowden moved to M Street in Washington, where she currently resides. It was here that she composed her M Street series, depicting the resilience of the people she encountered in the wake of displacement, migration and gentrification. The series of single-figure paintings is typical of Snowden’s signature depictions of expressive bodies, lyrical extremities and oversized yearning hands. Defined by thick impasto strokes of acrylic and oil pastel on Masonite, each work is titled after an individual who Snowden encountered in her neighbourhood of Shaw, Washington, D.C. Suspended in backgrounds devoid of reference to external reality, heavily rendered figures are conjured through a bold palette that ranges from dark and earthy to vibrant and emotive. Snowden’s subjects, many of whom were transient, unemployed and disenfranchised, inhabit the liminal space of a restricted compositional frame, in which she seeks to define the figure as both a formal and profoundly psychological entity.

The indomitable vitality of female protagonists is a persistent theme in Snowden’s oeuvre. The body of Michelle Haberon, (c. 1978) pulsates with eruptions of rich ochre, burnt umber and hints of earth greens and vivid blues, affording her an undeniably monumental presence. Beverly Johnson and Alice Shannon are sculpted through layers of cascading strokes defining twisted necks, spines and hunched shoulders, flanked by large, gripping hands reaching into the void. “I did a lot of things about hands and about how we use hands and their expressions”, Snowden recalls. “Many times what comes out of our mouths is more expressed with our fingers, or how our fingers move.”

In the series presented at Edel Assanti, Snowden exposes her subjects’ inner desires, ambitions, vulnerabilities, and fears, bearing witness to their presence and affirming their experience. As the artist notes: “I see things in other people that are reflected in me. My painting is me.”