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Lot Essay
Shimmering with light and colour, Webb is a hypnotic example of Howardena Pindell’s celebrated ‘spray dot’ paintings. Tiny spots of colour vibrate across the surface, creating luminous, undulating waves of ultramarine, teal, violet, rose and gold. Mercurial shapes and forms quiver and dissolve within its depths, immersing the viewer in a kaleidoscopic world of illusion. The work demonstrates the evolution of Pindell’s signature technique, begun during the 1970s. While working at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—where she later became the first Black woman to hold a curatorial position—she began to punch holes in office stationery such as card, envelopes and folders. These everyday materials became gateways to extraordinary painterly effects, forming stencils through which the artist would spray dots of paint. The results were entrancing, creating diffuse chromatic clouds that seemed to morph and mutate over the surface of the canvas. Executed in 2023, the present work’s diaphanous palette foreshadows Pindell’s recent Deep Sea series, as well as her panoramic tableau Oceanic Underwater (2025): a direct response to Claude Monet’s Water Lilies.
The past decade has witnessed a surge of critical interest in Pindell’s work: 2018 saw her first major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, followed in 2023 by her first UK institutional exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Born in Philadelphia in 1943, she grew up visiting the city’s art museum, and later became one of the first Black women to study art at Yale. There, the teachings of Josef Albers still loomed large following his recent retirement, and Pindell absorbed his ideas on colour theory. Following her graduation in 1967, she moved to New York and began what would become a long career at the Museum of Modern Art. She was particularly inspired by the museum’s exhibition African Textiles and Decorative Arts, which ran between 1972 and 1973. In 1981 she also spent time in Japan, where she encountered the 12th-century prayer scroll known as the Heike Nōkyō, housed in the Itsukushima Shrine near Hiroshima. Both of these influences would contribute to the intense layering and depth of pattern that has come to define her art.
While Pindell’s spray dot paintings invite visual comparison with Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets, they are perhaps closer in spirit to the semi-scientific approaches of artists such as Albers and Bridget Riley. Pindell recalls being entranced by looking at water through a microscope given to her by her mathematician father. She later spoke of circles as a universal form that called to mind atoms and molecules. At the same time, however, her work is underpinned by a strong personal and political subtext. The use of quotidian office supplies in her spray dot paintings, as well as her related ‘hole punch’ works, invokes the secretarial jobs routinely ascribed to women of lower socio-economic standing during the 1960s and 1970s. Her tiny circles also conjure memories of growing up during the Jim Crow era: she recalls the pain of visiting a root beer stand with her father, and noticing the small red dots used to segregate glasses for Black customers. In works such as Webb, Pindell reclaims and recontextualises these associations, transforming them into visions of abstract wonder, beauty and limitless possibility.
The past decade has witnessed a surge of critical interest in Pindell’s work: 2018 saw her first major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, followed in 2023 by her first UK institutional exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Born in Philadelphia in 1943, she grew up visiting the city’s art museum, and later became one of the first Black women to study art at Yale. There, the teachings of Josef Albers still loomed large following his recent retirement, and Pindell absorbed his ideas on colour theory. Following her graduation in 1967, she moved to New York and began what would become a long career at the Museum of Modern Art. She was particularly inspired by the museum’s exhibition African Textiles and Decorative Arts, which ran between 1972 and 1973. In 1981 she also spent time in Japan, where she encountered the 12th-century prayer scroll known as the Heike Nōkyō, housed in the Itsukushima Shrine near Hiroshima. Both of these influences would contribute to the intense layering and depth of pattern that has come to define her art.
While Pindell’s spray dot paintings invite visual comparison with Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets, they are perhaps closer in spirit to the semi-scientific approaches of artists such as Albers and Bridget Riley. Pindell recalls being entranced by looking at water through a microscope given to her by her mathematician father. She later spoke of circles as a universal form that called to mind atoms and molecules. At the same time, however, her work is underpinned by a strong personal and political subtext. The use of quotidian office supplies in her spray dot paintings, as well as her related ‘hole punch’ works, invokes the secretarial jobs routinely ascribed to women of lower socio-economic standing during the 1960s and 1970s. Her tiny circles also conjure memories of growing up during the Jim Crow era: she recalls the pain of visiting a root beer stand with her father, and noticing the small red dots used to segregate glasses for Black customers. In works such as Webb, Pindell reclaims and recontextualises these associations, transforming them into visions of abstract wonder, beauty and limitless possibility.