Nancy Haynes

Born 1947, Waterbury, Connecticut
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Nancy Haynes (born 1947) is an artist living and working in New York. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and shares her time between living in Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Huerfano Valley in Colorado.
Haynes is a conceptual artist. Her art-historical influences cite Marcel Duchamp, Mondrian, Dan Flavin, On Kawara and Ad Reinhardt, but as Marjorie Welish noted in her essay, "Nancy Haynes, A Literature of Silence", Haynes' also has influences from literature. Welish states:

"Nancy Haynes has produced a series of breath-taking monotypes inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett. That her admiration for him is long-standing comes as no surprise to those viewers familiar with her painting. She is aesthetically in accord with Beckett's assumption of "the divine aphasia," or speechlessness, against which mark-making is inadequate (That Which Memory Cannot Locate, 1991-92). She evidently admires that same impulse toward (the Heideggarean) "inadequacy of language" in art other than her own (Robert Ryman's own homage to Beckett's, Ill Seen Ill Said, with its barely voiced "th" inscribed in illustration, for instance). Cognizant of Vladimir and Estragon's cosmic fretfulness, she conducts her own forays into elegant stuttering on the visual plane."
In Haynes' recent paintings, the canvases began to "evolve from a paler shade of a given pigment to a darker one, creating a horizontal movement that pulls the eye toward an unseen source of light."

More notable works include her autobiographical color charts series (2005-2013), which employ swatches of color contained within grids, meant to give an autobiography of the artist.

Public Collections

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Holland
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria
Yale Museum of Art, New Haven, CT
Nancy Haynes
A Literature of Silence


by Marjorie Welish

Her paintings neither rest nor sleep but are decidedly devoted to an aesthetics of, as she says, "emptying out."

Certainly, in physical appearance, paintings by Nancy Haynes take heed of black. Black is the modernist sign of radicality. A utopian shade, black further entails the rhetoric of the tabula rasa, and indeed, the clean slate as support for painting once provided Haynes with the objective correlative she needed to make manifest her modern position.

Fundamentally, then, hers are black paintings, but with their black articulated in material and formal terms. Emptying out implies a withdrawal from color, the purpose being to concentrate the attention on the interior of the surface of the painting where there is much going on. Removal of any possibility of pursuing coloristic passions and attractiveness leaves these paintings understated yet not reductive, for frequently visible is an aurora borealis of gray. Indeed, a spectral range of black through white introduces a tonal chromaticism into the extremity of black, and into this modified contrast is further added a subtle play of warm into cool.

Black may be characterized as absence, the absence in consequence of all colors mixed in pigmented confusion; or in consequence of the withdrawal of light. Revealing optical as well as pigmented qualities, Haynes allows for the possibility that her gray paintings are those black canvases to which visibility has been brought. Interested in differences of factual light, Haynes started using luminous paint about fifteen years ago. Third Rail, (1984), for instance, displays four material differences of pigment, two of which, gold leaf and luminous paint, flank painted (black) and unpainted (linen) surfaces. Contrasting structural features were thus enhanced through the surface's severely polarized material differences. Technique has remained a preoccupation since. Yet the materialism of support-surface has also since entered into and been absorbed into a visuality more fluid, more yielding, than before. Sensually nuanced black readies the intellect for articulation. Putting it another way: with Haynes' spectral grays at her disposal, black is relieved of its dogmatisms. Just as light and dark interpenetrate in these recent works, so, too, do material and metaphysical content couple and uncouple freely (Once, 1990, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Now one sees that the utopian state of Not Yet has been handed over to an Adornoesque measure of tangling with unfulfilled possibilities.

Culturally, Haynes may be initially situated where Ad Reinhardt triangulates Theodor Adorno and Samuel Beckett (Unfilled [Plus], Untitled [Minus], 1986, Brooklyn Museums). Ad Reinhardt's Idealist belief in painting-about-painting was manifestly heroic, and long after Suprematism had bailed out of subject matter and anecdote, decoration and ingratiating incident, his abstraction bore the conviction that only form is relevant. Haynes follows in this lineage. The tonal, textural epidermis of her paintings is not at all the same as drab decor:- it is dedicated to creating visual stringency.

For Reinhardt, like Adorno, a concerted negativity in theory and practice is a decidedly positive advocacy of resistance:. resistance to interpretation, resistance to commodification. For Haynes, as well, an aesthetics of negation and negativity expresses an ardent resistance to taste. In her work no "renditions" of brushwork appease an audience new to the tradition of modernity. For the burden is on the viewer as much as it is on the artist to become visually literate if the pursuit of art is desired.

Of war or other catastrophe, once internallized-this cultural consciousness entailed by the most stringent of the New York School is presupposed by Haynes even though her work does not manifestly express such concerns. As Newman's Onement and Reinhardt's cruciform compositions and Rothko's liminal spaces inscribed existential extremity in material and formal terms, they established a standard of seriousness analogous to the seriousness of their cultural situation. Silence and self-discipline in art characterized their style. The "withdrawal of recluse, rebirth in seclusion," noted Ad Reinhardt about the symbol of black. His diaristic notes see the symbol as spiritually commodious. In this sense he is more generous to its expressive possibilities than Beckett. In perpetually subjective encounter with catastrophe or of matter catastophically apprehended, Beckett recalls Pascal: nothingness is the lived proximity to death one sews into one's clothing.

IRRITABILITY

No less real for being silent, the physicality of Haynes' painted surface is no mere universal category since becoming marked, textured, and distressed, as Adorno might appreciate. The surface of silence is both structured and inflected. In Untoward, 1990, for instance, nebulae of marks distinguish themselves into particularity, so that what results is calligraphy suggestive of, as the artist says, the East and the West on either side of a central spasmodic episode like "Turrette's Syndrome." Handwriting through which (psycho)somatic disarticulation always threatens to come about agitates the visual field.

Haynes' mark is the mark of the infinintessimal sensation. With surfaces so inflected, Haynes' art reveals the visual precision we associate with an etcher's mentality. Pitted surfaces vexed with all manner of painstaking decisions point to a scrupulousness of inscription. Haynes' visual fields, then, reveal the irritability by which one comes to understand expressive gesture at its most sensitized (Fort-Da, 1990-91 ).


BETWEEN IRRITABILITY AND ITERABILITY

A mark is a gesture at its most minutely signifying. Reliance on the singular seminal nature of the mark, touch or brushstroke, is at least, the radical assumption of New York School artists and their latter-day material proponents. Reinhardt's carefully adjusted early brushwork is a forerunner of even more carefully situated later planes within black. The painstakinglyadjudicated atmospheres of Arshile Gorky, Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko all suggest that in the best artists sensitivity of surface corresponds to closer and closer approximations of an issue, a question, an articulation of structure.

Slow apprehension of an integrally indiscernible space of painting may be seen in Haynes' work. Given the half-erased space being articulated, the brushiness seems to be procreative of as many doubts as clarifications (Naming, 1991; The Painting in Question, 1991). Whatever else it is, the mark is surely not in Haynes's art a conspirator of decor, merely habitual in its facility to render a surface intelligible. As with the divisions within Barnett Newman's visual fields, Haynes' mark or brushstroke signifies the artist's location of an abyss and, so, condition of a distant "there" against which the mark establishes a conditional "here." (With the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan advancing the notion of the subject caught between mark and a void, perhaps the Heideggerian coefficient of Newman's "zip" is the quality of the mark Lacan had in mind [Brushstroke, for Michael, 1991 ].)

The structure of iterability may, in painting, take the form of a mark scratching that which can be said non-verbally, and repeated, tracing a regressive chain of nuanced incertitude. So in Haynes's work, the internal frames that indicate the inflected void of the canvas are themselves inflected and adjusted reiteratively. One way or another, the visual intelligibility of field voices its hesitancy: shades of gray worry, apologize after the fact, speak in wistful selfaddress, manifest tendencies of approach-avoidance, and scenarios of revision (Referent, 1992; Revisionist History, 1992).


THE LITERATURE OF SILENCE

Nancy Haynes has produced a series of breath-taking monotypes inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett. That her admiration for him is long-standing comes as no surprise to those viewers familiar with her painting. She is aesthetically in accord with Beckett's assumption of "the divine aphasia," or speechlessness, against which mark-making is inadequate (That Which Memory Cannot Locate, 1991-92). She evidently admires that same impulse toward (the Heideggarean) "inadequacy of language" in art other than her own (Robert Ryman's own homage to Beckett's, Ill Seen Ill Said, with its barely voiced "th" inscribed in illustration, for instance). Cognizant of Vladimir and Estragon's cosmic fretfulness, she conducts her own forays into elegant stuttering on the visual plane.

Haynes is by no means alone in remaining riveted by the paradoxical nature of black to expresses meaninglessness and meaning both at supersaturated strength (Seppuku, 199 1 ). From Beckett's bleak spirituality to Reinhardt's studies of spirituality informing Thomas Merton's silence, and from the West's fascination with the religions' of the Fast placing positive value on negativity to Existential void, the literature of silence remains a matter of conviction for a generation of artists. Certainly its terms of imploded bereavement yet also its positive valence define a domain familiar to Nancy Haynes. She has not been content to rest here, however, and among the artists working now she is singular in a visual intelligence which will not allow her to content herself with the habit of silence but which instead leads her to excavate it more and more inquiringly.


Marjorie Welish August 1993


Endspace: From a Real to an Absolute
Nancy Haynes' Paintings 1974-1998


Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

One could look at an artist's career as a matter of how some things change while others stay the same, or as one of how change on one side of the coin redefines what's on the other. These quite incompatible approaches are equally useful, and the remarks I want to make here - which follow (and in some respects qualify) what I have said about Haynes' work elsewhere - are I think consistent with both. They amount to the thought that perhaps what has happened in Haynes' work of the past nearly thirty years should be described as the substitution of the discourse of the screen for that of the thing.") Painting's surface - a place of production but also projection, a plane of flatness but also of space - always and never was either, in which regard it seems worth remembering that with the coming of film the word "frame" ceased to refer to what surrounds the picture and came instead to describe the whole (still) image, and that while Haynes began with a minimalist aesthetic founded in thingness rather than spatiality, all contemporary painting is made in a world populated by screens and defined by what happens on them. Or should that be in them? A screen is a plane which contains, what's on the screen is in the frame (its origins as much in print as in pictorialism: what's on the front page is the most important thing in the newspaper).

One advantage of talking about Haynes' development as a passage from the object to the screen is that doing so holds in check any tendency to describe it byway of the traditional conventions of pictorial space. Haynes doesn't feel comfortable discussing her work in those terms, and her practice becomes clearer if one tries to attend to how the idea of spatiality (which is a priori, which is to say, we can't think without it) reemerges in her paintings by routes other than those which run through the history of landscape painting. If it is a passage from the object to the screen it is one that began almost within the object. In and around 1974 Haynes made some very small works which she called "Pocket Paintings", after the tiny "pocket" violins she had seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, (where she worked in the Musical Instruments Department). The pocket paintings are made by placing one stretcher across another, volumetric or "real" space articulated or defamiliarized by the assemblage considered as a thing while black, white, and the materiality of linen perform a further rearticulation (defamiliarize the defamiliarization) through the language of the surface, where modulation replaces construction, which is to say, where (phenomenal) concepts of appearing and disappearing displace (ethical) ones of revealing and concealing.

This surface continued to develop towards a kind of independence from its support. Works like Untitled, 1981, (which is called a construction as opposed to a painting), and Suspended Judgment, 1984-85 (see page 23), involved asymmetrical dispositions of mostly uninflected colours and surfaces, concentrating one's attention on their interrelationships and on the support insofar as the surface(s) must be seen as acting in close concert with it, and in the second half of the nineteen-eighties this development entered a new stage.
By Untitled, 1986-87, a cruciform - or, as she puts it, "plus-shaped" painting slightly higher than it is wide, the surface of Haynes' paintings had acquired a different kind of visible tension with the support than earlier, although this had been anticipated by paintings like Suspended Judgment to the degree that they were made out of two kinds of paint, and therefore of qualities (tactile but implicitly spatial too) the differences between which affected one's sense of the extremities of the work.

Suspended Judgment balances enamel paint and oil paint, the one heavy and viscous, the other lighter but in that by no means necessarily less intense (in fact the reverse, precisely because of its relatively low viscosity): two quantities and qualities of darkness, absorbing light, or not, differently, a difference which is the difference between two kinds of paint. It should be noted, in passing, that the painting exploits phenomenal differences which are also recognizable as differences of another kind. One buys enamel at the hardware, rather than the art materials, store. Art historically speaking its extra-artistic origins link it to Duchamp and the Readymade, and to Pollock's automobile enamel.

Before Untitled, 1986-87, then, the surface already exhibits properties having nothing to do with the support - decisions about what colour or kind of paint to use in Suspended Judgment involved judgments more about what to bring to the support than with what to derive from it. But in Untitled, 1986-87, - painted, significantly, on slate, a material which does not belong to that tradition of disappearing into the spatiality of the pictorial to which panel or canvas are central - Haynes' intensification of one's sense of the surface, achieved by developing it as a place of inflection and accumulation, causes it to dissolve, problematizing its continuity with its support by eroding the thingness of slate through what is added to it.

Light seems to come from within the surface of Untitled, 1986-87, which is to say that it presents an asymmetrical relationship between visible extension or openness and impenetrable limitlessness. Writing about another painting in this series shortly after it was made I described it as a work in which one had more space to the extent that it had less black, also that black and white are not simply opposites, because where white may signify spaciality as uninterrupted openness, black is an interruption by definition and black surfaces signify greater or lesser porousness, openness slowed down but not precluded. Such a description proceeds from the traditional terms in which paintings may be seen to work, but which nonrepresentational painting detaches from their original connection to that alternation of the solid to the void which is the basis of representation. In the West painting has generally been thought to be founded in drawing, and black and white to function in one of two ways. They may suggest modeling, where darkness represents that which is turned away from the light or its shadow. Or they may signify two kinds of space, the visible space of the illuminated-a clear sky and a flat plain being, generally speaking, represented in drawing by leaving the paper blank - and the impenetrable space of that which contains no light nor is lit from without - the void. White as infinite penetrability, black as impenetrable infinity: the openness of a sunlit field, the claustrophobia of an equally open space obscured and in that rendered unnavigable by darkness. Derrida, following Heidegger, has described the black (or at any rate dark) line common to both drawing and writing, which signifies form by not being a property of it, as a void held together by its outside edges, a chasm separating forms from other forms and from formlessness. Haynes' work has nothing to do with modeling anything, but it may have everything to do with the surface's innate capacity to make what one looks at - a plane which is the face of an object - also be that which one looks into. (As one also looks into, as well as at, faces themselves.)

In the world of things, there are no voids next to voids. Voids are always penetrations of things, or that infinity in which things exist but which is only known through them in representational painting space is that which is not filled, rendered tangible by the Impressionists, the first painters to seek an equation between thingness and nothingness which could take the form of a common materiality linking objects, the light which brings them into view, and the atmosphere which blurs the one and disperses the other. In nonrepresentation, however, voids next to voids is often exactly what one has. Clement Greenberg's observation that Pollock was the first painter to use line to produce a space which was not divisible into solids and voids could be applied to Haynes' use of darkness and light to produce a combination of voids - significations of the not-solid - which undermine the objectness of the object because, as voids, they signify an absence of objectness or substantiality.

It is in this way that Haynes emphasizes the materiality of the surface in Untitled, 1986-87, so as to undermine the presence as material of the support, and this will continue to be a feature of her work. Writing about a later monotype, Christine Mehring will say that "Haynes erases the materiality of the paper... subtract(ing) from its thickness and impenetrability by adding an oily paint ... opening rather than closing its pores, and allowing light to illuminate it from behind.") What Mehring calls "subtraction through addition" begins in the slate paintings with the addition of white to dark grey (for which the technology of oil paint has a name: "Davies Grey", the grey that's made out of slate).

And as I have said, white surfaces are seen or read as surfaces filled with light, but black (or very dark grey) surfaces don't just do the opposite. Black which is not shiny (in which case one looks at it through a transparent but glossy veil) is porous, an image of the absorbent as well as of impenetrability. In Untitled, 1986-87, white is added to dark grey, replacing the surface's impenetrability with openness. Haynes has said that "Gradually, my paintings have become more and more about erasure and emptying out" and, although I think that's only half the story, it is worth remaining with Untitled, 1986-87, a moment longer in order to think about how erasure in Haynes is an inversion of what it usually is.3) I note also that you can't empty anything out of anything unless it's a space of some kind, although you can erase what's on a surface, and so it is that in painting the one means the other.

In Matisse's Red Studio one comes, at the centre of the furthest recess of the depicted space, to the face of a clock, at which point one is looking at the white lead ground which runs beneath the film of paint that covers the rest of the painting, and in doing so subtracts from white's brightness.4) The culmination of the pictorial space is the painting's beginning, its ground, staring one in the face in the form of a face (which measures time). In Haynes, white is added. One starts with that from which white (which is to say, light) is absent. Adding white is like adding formlessness, and this is why I talk about dissolution in regard to works like Untitled, 1986-87, and those that come after: what is subtracted is the materiality of the support, through the addition of an erasure which causes it to melt into a kind of space.

Haynes cites Seurat's drawings as a source for some of her most recent paintings, and used heavy linen to make them in order to achieve an effect like his, of blurring through accumulation, form intensified (rather than the reverse) by being deprived of solidity. Painting into Drawing, 1997 (see page 41), uses the texture of the canvas to complicate the surface made by painting with a foam-rubber brush, converting a thick material into a surface which looks as if it is filled with air. The painting is reminiscent, in this and other respects, of From A to B,1991, which was called that because it looked like a slikscreen, suggesting a process which squeezes colour through a screen to produce a surface at once intense and the opposite of thick. Much later, Haynes told me that painting From A to B had made her see that she .. wanted to quiet the whole thing down". It was "less important that there should be that much depth" (but) "I wanted it to look effortless, as if it just appeared". Which is what Matisse said he wanted his paintings to look like, and they too were thin, for that same reason.


Intensity through thinness is what one sees when one looks at the surface of a screen as opposed to the exterior plane of an object, and the passage from thing to screen (from slate as support to silkscreen as reference) having in a sense been completed by the end of 1991, one may see Haynes' more recent work as a reexamination and development of the thinness that the screen-effect requires.

Which brings one to the other half of the story, the filling-up part. One may begin with what's there already. Barnett Newman said somewhere that he thought it irresponsible not to give titles to paintings, and Haynes often titles her paintings, not infrequently with references to Samuel Beckett - often responsible, therefore, but sometimes not. Of Beckett's use of the theme of the endgame, which has provided inspiration for Haynes on more than one occasion, one may recall that he himself did not believe it could be realized in art - or, alternatively, I suppose one could say he didn't believe art could do anything else. His last words were "Fail again, fail better", which surely recall valiant attempts to posit reconciliations between inherent contradictions. Cezanne's desire to reconcile Impressionism with Classicism may be visual art's most familiar example of such an endeavour, but one could add to it Seurat's conjuring up formlessness through an assiduous attention to form. In Haynes' work the idea of form has long since given way to possibilities for movement which forms themselves cannot express. In 1995 she made an exhibition at a gallery in Texas which she entitled Endgame/Brain Coral, in which she showed small sculptures made of cast brain coral which she described as "frozen labyrinths" which is to say, form obscured by movement. In the same show she exhibited a row of the Mirror Sites (see page 51), works which glow in the dark, presenting that which comes to light when general illumination - which defines the world as solids and absences - is itself absent. Haynes' surface is at once a zone of dissolution and in every other sense a place filled with information, where density equals openness and lightness, produced by a process which relates an experience of space - an accumulation of marks of which some signify emptying - to and through an idea of the temporal, with which I shall I conclude.

I have suggested that however much Haynes' paintings may be about erasure and emptying, the way they are emptied and erased fills them with an idea of painting as a place where the unrealizable may be made visible. A painting of circa 1984, Third Rail (see page 21), begins on the left with gold leaf and ends on the right with glow in the dark paint (in the middle contrasting oil with acrylic). The panels are in a sequence ordered A/C/B/D, where "A" is thinnest and "D" thickest, so that the end panels represent extremes but what comes between them is not a progressive or straightforward passage from one to the other. The difference in thickness between the two end panels relates to a distinction Haynes draws between real space and what she calls absolute space, in which light is a property of specific objects - a premise literalized in glow-in-the-dark paint, while gold depends on the light of the real - and where continuity is not encumbered by things nor a matter of measurable depth. This is the condition of music, certainly, but also of film, in which, as in dreams, one moves effortlessly from one space and time to another. When films provide the titles for Haynes' paintings - reminding one that all art in this century takes place in the shadow of the screen - they tend to be sixties films, the works which provided germinal inspiration for her generation, which is also mine. A generation obliged to think beyond Minimalism's fetishization of thingness at the expense of spatiality, which in the thinking of the tendency's founding father Don Judd had quickly become an intellectually impoverished rational for sculpture and against painting which put itself forward as a crusade against illusionism of any - but especially the pictorial - sort, including that over which the eye has no control, puritanism masquerading as materialism. Study for Rashomon and Day for Night, both 1994, refer to narratives made out of doubt and ambiguity, of illusion obscuring and qualifying illusion. Nothing could be further from Judd's fantasy that specificity meant objectivity. This is the sense in which one could as well talk about Haynes' paintings suspending the real, in favour of the virtuality of the absolute, as of their cancelling, emptying, or eroding or dissolving, it. Her paintings that are made with paint that glows in the dark reinstitute that other glowing surface sometimes encountered in the home with turned off, the television or computer screen that's been left on. There is no object there, only a surface with light inside it. And I should want to insist that it is inside, rather than either behind or on, it - perhaps the thickest panel in Third Rail is the glow-in-the-dark one because that's the one most threatened by dissolution through colour. Elsewhere, Haynes' use of yellow seems to me to gesture in the direction of the same principle. Yellow, unlike black or white, defeats the idea of depth while being so spatially active as to never be fully identifiable with whatever surface may bear it. Always fully there and yet never a thing, it is a phenomenon in the Heideggerian sense, fully present and in that revealing, which is to say, leading towards, nothing.

As such, in paintings like Study for Rashomon or Margin and Breach, 1995, yellow engages one in the surface as the place of traces of activity which are at the same time movements in themselves, taking place within or through a colour which, if it were to refer to anything, might be more readily associated with light or liquidity them-selves than with any solid substance or form. Like anybody's, Haynes' works are filled with art history before they are made, and it's not so much emptied out or erased as intensified to the state of dissolution. Minimalism is in effect liquified by being taken literally. In Haynes, as in the work of others of her generation, painting found a way out of the endgame which defined the status quo when she began by pursuing the irreducibility to thingness of colour and the mark (one a surface, the other an inscription, both voids).

Haynes' conversation about her paintings is peppered with invocations of equilibrium. (I could also say something here, in connection with this and also with my previous observation about the suspension of the real, about the ambiguity of Suspended Judgement's title: since all paintings are suspended I may not be looking at suspended judgement but rather at its opposite, i.e., judgement, suspended. Kant on a wall.) She talks about trying to work in a way where neither horizontality or verticality would matter that much", and I have quoted her here talking about quieting down. In order to get the painting to become something that has to be contemplated rather than decoded, its meaning allowed to unfold through its surface, she says "You have to start slowly, with just a few marks, otherwise it gets filled in too quickly". She has described this resistance to filling-in too quickly as anti-claustrophobic, and Molly's Soliloquy, 1991, as a painting which flirts with claustrophobia. I have elsewhere compared and contrasted Molly's Soliloquy to electronic screens' capacity to rob form of substance, and if it flirts with claustrophobia I'd suggest that it does so by bringing density into a maximal convergence with openness and lightness.

Time is important in these paintings because it is that which is both cancelled and intensified within the fluidity of the slowly accumulated marks which make up the surface. All the properties and qualities brought into view 'in these works, the heaviness of one kind of paint as against the lightness of another, the thickness of heavy-gauge linen contrasted with the thin layer of paint spread across, and interrupted by, it, the use of layers inextricable from one another because of their translucency, of bits of paint which sit on top of the surface in order that they may float in as well as on it, serve the goal of replacing the real with the absolute in Haynes' terms. The space of painting becomes a place for an encounter with time as reversibility, which is to say, as equilibrium. Reversibility is what art can do and the real cannot. The beginning can come at the end, particularly when its realization is an end, the endgame a concretization in nothingness of the ambiguity whose potential first motivated the work. If what unfolds (as a refolding, of voids within as well as next to voids, marks behind marks one minute but in front of others the next) in the absolute space and therefore time (can't have space without time) of Haynes' paintings happens nowhere else, it is also not clear that it happens there either. As with Seurat, I see Haynes' paintings as being about an experience of movement conjured up by the surface rather than traces of actions already taken-it is a matter of what the process leads to rather than of what leads back to it, although of course the one comes with the other. Made slowly to be seen slowly, they do not communicate time as compressed or expanded, but as reversible. In them one looks at time suspended, the fast slowed down and extended but also the slow projected into simultaneity, which always and immediately collapses and leads into traces of its past (as erasure) and into a space made impenetrable thinness which brings it into view (emptying the tangible, thinning out the space).

What looks back when one looks at a Haynes painting is not painting as endgame, excepting in the sense that that is where painting always begins, but the uncontrollable potential contained in the refusal of surfaces to be things, insisting instead on being places as well as planes. Planes to which she has given a particular (formless) form in which colour and the mark conspire to suspend flatness in a space of its own (un)making and, with them, end and beginning - and game and work for that matter - in the impossible, or absolute, temporal equilibrium of the effortlessly all at once.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

A painter who also writes about art, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is the 1998 recipient of the Frank Jewitt Mather Award, presented by the College Art Association for distinction in art or architectural criticism.


Something to Glow On


Barbara MacAdam

Her storefront studio in the industrial Red Hook section of Brooklyn is Nancy Haynes's pride and agony. Despite floods and invasions of starlings, squirrels, and other natural and unnatural predators, Haynes has managed to keep the place patched together and very tidy. Unfussy and workmanlike but for a large, slouchy white sofa the studio opens onto an effusive, intensely worked garden.

"It bothers me when people say my work is inspired by nature. It's not," Haynes insists of her minimalist-informed abstract paintings, often in shades of green and yellow. Unless what they detect, Haynes laughs, is the influence of the garden's "carnage in the lower realms," that teeming, fertile society of worms and insects.

For 18 years, Haynes has been interjecting into her paintings a sulfurous Greenish gray pigment, which must be charged by light and then viewed in the dark. As its glow fades, shapes change. Such "fugitive" paint presents a paradox: a presence that is also an absence. It "forces you to fill in what you can't see," Haynes explains. "It allows for elusive memory you can know it's there, but you can't situate it precisely."

Haynes cloaks herself, like her paintings, in the subtlety of what seems to be uncompromising minimalism. Dressed in jeans and shirttails with a cashmere sweater, the 50-year-old artist exudes an air of fastidious bohemianism. This has been a good year for her. She has shown in Europe and the United States, at venues ranging from Lawing Gallery in Houston, Texas, with which she's had a long association to Hubert Winter's galleries in Vienna and Berlin and Galerie von Bartha, in Basel. And she was in a major show at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Cambridge, and another at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and has recently signed on with New York's Stark Gallery.

All of this activity is reflected in the ever-changing configuration of her studio. Neatly stacked racks hold paintings that run from forthright small geometric diptychs of the late 1960s to large canvases with rows of angled gestures. On the floor are cans filled with "brushes" Haynes designed for her recent works: "I make a handle to accommodate sponges," she says. Using sponges enables her to repeat a shape, so the paint mimics a building block, giving some of her works an architectural aspect and creating what she calls "..consistency with anomalies."

Haynes is a builder: she worked on her studio, the closets, the library, everything. Likewise. her paintings and prints are constructs, palimpsests, built layer upon layer and often based on a grid. But, But, explains, "now I'm using a different sort of architecture" -one in which "I want to fracture these horizontal bands." And this leads her to cubism. She builds the grid but then wants to dissolve it. "I always turn to cubism when I'm in a comer," she says. "I use it as a foundation in certain works, or sometimes it's just a way of referring to other paintings." Whichever, it shows up in the play of surfaces, the advancing and retreating of color and form, the idea of the inside sharing the surface with the outside, all conjuring the effects if not the look of Cezanne.

She is also exploring the surface itself, in paintings inspired by Seurat's drawings. In these, Haynes makes marks using a paint-laden foam brush and the weight of her hand-without gesture or nuance. Applied to a heavy linen surface, she feels, the painting Seurat's textures.

Other works are stimulated by books, including diptychs that suggest open texts, with horigestures hinting at reading from left to right and, of course, between the lines. The glow-in-the-dark paint makes the idea of text and subtext quite literal, as the latter rises to the surface, briefly illuminating it, and then retreats, waiting to be recharged.

Film and language also inform Haynes's paintings, though she rigorously insists on the non- referentiality of her art. In 1987 Haynes be-an making what she calls "languages paintings."

"The first ones were Circumlocution and Fiction within Fiction. They were paintings that seemed specific to language---in some ways talking to the many questions of art and other artists." She did an editioned silk screen, for example, after her painting, Endgame, named for Beckett's play. But she also explains that language refers to her visual dialogues with other painters. "For instance, once when I was using the diptych, I was thinking about Jonathan Lasker's diagrams and Jasper Johns's crosshatch work." Many titles refer to painting's communicative act - titles like Referent, Discourse, and Body Language.

The painting Object of Negation (1995) veers away from language It describes a new kind of light in art, one that critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe refers to, when describing her work, as video's thin brightness." The picture is a string of images, like an empty filmstrip. It suggests a narrative line. At the same time. "it's about negative images - what's not there," she explains.

Some of her best-known works from the 1980s have the tone and attitude of film noir - cool, seductive, and threatening. Horizontal streaks of black paint over light tones on half the canvas evoke the sense of venetian blinds, while vertical veils of paint on the other have a more ominous look.

Haynes's apparently rigid shell of nonrepresentation does admit occasional cracks - of emotion and sometimes, almost, figure. "In the personal painting,"she explains, '*everything gets contradicted." After her mother died, she did a painting titled Eulogy, which was stolen out of a gallery. The painting had, she recalls, an anomalous "bluish elliptical area." It was a very emotional work. Then, last year, she made Primo Levi in Turin, with an almost solid black center.

Haynes was born in Connecticut. "We were supposed to be born at West Point," she says of herself and her twin brother, "but we were early." Since their father was in the military, the family-four brothers and a sister-moved frequently and spent two years in Istanbul. "There were scorpions everywhere," she recounts, and she can still remember magnolias and the wild boar her father killed. But most of all, she thinks about the evening light on the Bosporus and archeological sites.

It was more than place that made her decide to become an artist. When she was young and living in Marin County, California she used to visit an elderly artist named Elsie Pomeroy. "We had a painting by her-of water lilies-which I still have. I realized then that painters could be female, and that they could have a wonderful place to work, a studio, and it could be a hideout. I knew at that moment I was going to paint."

First, though, Haynes tried college, twice, in Colorado, and even took a few art classes-including life drawing and sculpture She remembers making a sculpture in college and how the instructor, in an effort to prove that the welding wasn't strong enough, dropped it on the floor. It broke. Haynes left.

After arriving in New York in 1967, Haynes found a seventh-floor walkup in SoHo, held a succession of odd jobs, and traveled. Her first studio-after the "kitchen table"-was a room in a friend's loft. She became a librarian at the school her daughters Kirsten and Elise, attended, and later an adjunct professor of painting at Hunter College, with brief stints as a visiting artist at Harvard and the Ringling School of Art and Design. She lives with her husband, sculptor Michael Metz, and reads widely, everything from Practical Pruning to lots of fiction.

Haynes had her first solo show in 1981 at the David Bellman Gallery in Toronto, followed by exhibitions in New York at John Gibson and John Good, which represented her from 1987 until its closing in 1994. There have been shows in museums and public spaces, including a Project Room at P.S. 1, in Long Island City, in 1984: the Long Beach Museum of Art, in 1991-92): the Chrysler Museum of Art, in 1992; and the Gemeentemuseum, in The Hague, in 1985. Her work sells in the range of $600 to $3,500 for monotypes and $6,000 to $22,000 for recent paintings.

Lately, Haynes has been using more color. "In these new paintings," she says. "I use two kinds of light; the paint is no longer only fugitive, although the effect can be similar. I'm complicating the light," she explains, "the way I do with glow-in-the-dark paints." So now rusty reds and rich bright blues play against a grayish ground with greenish yellow overtones. The effect of the almost tawdry colors on the strange neutral tone is a sexy one.

In fact, Seismographic Negligee and Study for Rashomon, two recent paintings, "feel undressed." Haynes says. "It's supposed to be the painting undressed, the skeleton of the painting." In Rashomon, a diptych, she notes how "the position and brush strokes are based on a little Mondrian watercolor." The tones are reminiscent of Barnett Newman, and, she says, the movement is '*like Boccioni,"

Turning away from the canvases, Haynes looks out the studio door, and remarks on how wonderful summer is "when the grape arbor fills in and casts a delicate, eerie, green aura on the studio walls."

Barbara MacAdam is senior editor of ARTnews



Nancy Haynes: Illusion and Absence
Paintings: 2002


Alfred Mac Adam

The events of September 11, 2001 shook New York to its core, profoundly disrupting all aspects of life, but never paralyzing it. For all its overt brusqueness, New York is a city of accommodations: We negotiate-make deals-because commerce, the exchange of goods and information, has been the lifeblood of our city since its foundation by the Dutch in 1624.

Since September 11, New Yorkers have been negotiating with themselves, trying to find the deal "we can live with" that will enable us to place those events in our past, so the past will not eclipse the present. Nancy Haynes's negotiates through her paintings. Like the rest of us, she finds herself in the paradoxical situation-seemingly static but actually dynamic-described by Samuel Beckett's narrator in Texts for Nothing:

Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on.

Her work, then, constitutes a bridge from before to tomorrow. In this suite of paintings created between 2000 and 2002, Haynes includes a brilliant orange composition: After September 11. The ambiguity of that title-the "after" may refer to time, but it just as easily could suggest "in the manner of"-reflects the ambiguous status of September 11 in our collective imagination. The painting itself is no document, no testimony, but at some deep level it is both of these things as well as a reflection of the negotiation process: We cannot comprehend what happened, but we must get used to living with this enigma because living is our only option.

Haynes accomplishes this simultaneous act of expression and accommodation by focusing exclusively on visual experience, definitively liberating painting from anecdote and representation. So these canvases constitute a world unto themselves. In purely formal terms, we move from zones of pure color-where opacity from time to time yields to transparency, where deep, perhaps repressed elements, invade the surface-to bound spaces, where the swaths of color at the edges constitute a framing device. In both these modes, we see Haynes deliberately enunciating two concepts of "personal" though non-representational art: Her pure color paintings seem to invite a psychological interpretation, while her framed paintings tantalize our visual skills with false and real perspectives. She captures us in the dialectic of color and geometry, the source of both the power and the tension of her work. But, as usual, there is "more here than meets the eye."

Haynes's paintings do reflect our historic disquiet, but her disquiet is the life-long burden of the abstract painter. The start of the new millennium is probably an opportune moment to consider abstraction's reason for being and to reconsider Wilhelm Worringer's 1908 essay Abstraction and Empathy. In that long-overlooked text, Worringer tries to explain the difference between representation (which he calls empathy) and abstraction and why they constitute the two poles of artistic expression:

Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. When Tibullus says: primum in mundo fecit deus timor, this same sensation of fear may also be assumed as the root of artistic creation. (Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock, p.15)

Worringer's idea of a kind of spiritual agoraphobia, a variation on horror vacui, is a useful hermeneutic device for comprehending Nancy Haynes's concept of abstraction. Understood this way, her paintings become metaphors for her existentially necessary will-to-power: Either she controls space or space will control her.

Two very different paintings illustrate her attitude: Field Notes IV and Red Orange Scaffold. The idea of the "field notes" series derives from out-of-studio experience, forays into nature and society recalled in memory, but, at the same time, these smaller format canvases constitute fields Haynes has appropriated to herself, not "notes about what I've seen in the field," but "notes on a field." That is, the world becomes the canvas because Haynes inscribes herself onto it, though here we sense the turmoil of chaos brought under artistic control. Red Orange Scaffold reverses that idea: A scaffold is a temporary structure used either to build or repair a construction. What Haynes shows us here is a project, a work-in-progress whose "unfinished" lower right corner reminds us that the artist's control of alien space is only metaphoric, always incomplete.

This pendular swing between precarious structure-paintings whose right and left margins are boundaries, columns of color, like Ornithology and Field Notes III-and flirtations with chaos--Mute, an ominous painting from 1991, Field Notes I or the delicately modulated Monochrome I and Monochrome II-are the thesis and antithesis of Nancy Haynes's artistic dialectic. Either she is acknowledging the presence of dreadful space, or she is imposing an order on it: awareness and utopia.

The strength of these works discloses itself slowly. Which is why the viewer must, following the sage advice of Richard Wollheim in Painting as an Art, pause-siste viator-and carefully observe these paintings both from a distance and at close range. Only by consciously studying the different spatial negotiations each contains can we see the struggle to control a meaningless universe that is taking place on their several levels. These paintings are Nancy Haynes's philosophic autobiography, but they are, of course, our own as well.

Alfred Mac Adam is a writer and translator who teaches at Barnard College-Columbia University.
Group shows at Ceysson Gallery
Feed the Meter, Wandhaff
September 23 - December 16, 2017


Solo Exhibitions

2012
the painting undressed - selections from the autobiographical color chart series, 3A Gallery, New York, USA
George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, USA

2010
George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, USA

2009
dissolution, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, USA

2006
Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria

2002
Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria

2000
Between Two Appearances, Stark Gallery, New York, USA

1998
Galerie von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland
Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria
Monotypes, Galerie Mathias Kampl, Munich, Germany
Lawing Gallery, Houston, USA

1995
Endgame, Brain Coral, Lawing Gallery, Houston, USA
Monotypes, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, USA

1993
John Good Gallery, New York, USA

1992
The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, USA

1991
The Lacuna of Certainty, The Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, USA
John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Genovese Annex, Boston, USA

1990
John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Monotypes, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, USA

1989
John Good Gallery, New York, USA

1987
Julian Pretto Gallery, New York, USA

1986
John Gibson Gallery, New York, USA

1985
John Gibson Gallery, New York, USA
Plus-Kern Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Holland

1984
.S. 1 Project Room, Long Island City, USA

1983
David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada

1981
David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Selected Group Exhibitions

2012
Cool, Calm, Collected, Danese Gallery, New York, USA
Letters Not About Love: EJ Hauser, Nancy Haynes and Sarah Peters, curated by Yevgeniya Baras, Regina Rex Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, USA
art=text=art: works by contemporary artists, curated by N. Elizabeth Schlatter and Rachel Nachman, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
MIC; CHECK, group exhibition, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, USA

2011
Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists, Joel & Lila Harnett,Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, USA
it's all good!! apocalypse now, group exhibition, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, USA

2010
New York, encore selections from gallery artists, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, USA

2009
the viewing room, Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, USA

2008
Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, USA
Dimensions in Nature: New Acquisitions, 2006-2008, organized by Betti-Sue Hertz and Erica Overskei San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA

2007
Written on the Wind: The Flag Project, Rubin Museum, New York, USA
Monumental Drawings, curated by Barbara MacAdam, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, USA

2006
Faith, curated by James Hyde, Real Art Ways, Hartford, USA
The Independents, curated by Judith Selkowitz, 499 park avenue, USA

2005
The Mark of Minimalism: Gifts of Work on Paper from Sarah-Ann and Werner Kramarsky, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, USA
Fine Lines from the collection of Wynn Kramarsky, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, USA

2004
The Invisible Thread: Buddhist Spirit in Contemporary Art, curated by Robyn Brentano, Olivia Georgia, Roger Lipsky, and Lilly Wei, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, USA
Priority, Art in General Gallery, New York, USA
Flag Project, curated by Arlene Shechet and Kiki Smith, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, New York, USA
Art for a Landmine Free World, curated by Kiki Smith PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, USA

2002/03
Drawings of Choice from a New York Collection, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, traveled to: The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, USA

2003
Of Collage: The Artist as Collector, The John A. Schweitzer Collection, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Pointe-Claire, Quebec, Canada
Selections from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida, USA

2002
Made in Brooklyn, curated by Chris Martin and Nellie Appleby, S.Cono Pizzeria, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA
Glow: Aspects of Light in Contemporary American Art, curated by: Francis Colpitt, Artpace, San Antonio, traveled to: The University of Texas at San Antonio Art Gallery, The Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, Texas, University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, Texas, USA

2001
Abstraction and Immanence, curated by Laura Sue Phillips and Vincent Longo, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York, USA
Fifteen Years of Painting, Stark Gallery, New York, USA
Cinema Studies, curated by Aruna D'Souza, Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York, USA
Monochrome/Monochrome?, curated by Lilly Wei, Florence Lynch Gallery, New York, USA

2000
Not Seeing, Lawing Gallery, Houston, USA
trans-luzid, curated by Klaus Dieter Zimmer, Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz, Austria
Five Masterpieces, Galerie Von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland
A Decade of Collecting, Recent Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, USA

1999
Then & Now, curated by Theresa Chong, The Work Space, New York, USA

1998
A Common Thread, Littlejohn Contemporary, New York, USA
Large Scale Drawings from the Collection of Wynn Kramarsky, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, USA

1997/01
Drawing is another kind of language, Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection, Harvard University Art Musueums, Cambridge, USA
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Kunst Museum Ahlen, Akademieder Kunste, Berlin, Germany
Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Picardie and Musee de Picardie, Amiens, France
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, USA
Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, USA
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, curated by James Cuno, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, USA

1997
Abstraction Index, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, New York, USA
After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting since 1970, curated by Lilly Wei, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, USA

1996
Art Show, curated by Ted Porter, Ryall/Porter Architects, New York, USA
Colorfield to New Abstraction, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA
Formal Abstraction / New York, curated by Robert Kingston, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, USA

In Black & White, Numark Gallery, Washington, DC, USA
Silence, Lawing Gallery, Houston, USA
The Julian Pretto Collection, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, USA
Ronald Bladen, Nancy Haynes and Olivier Mosset, John Gibson Gallery, New York, USA

1995/96
Printmaking in America--Collaborative Prints and Presses 1960- 1990, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, New Brunswick, USA
Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, USA

1995
Alchemy, curated by Harvey Quaytman, Proctor Art Center, Bard College, Annandale-on Hudson, USA
Changing Perspectives, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, USA
Abstraction from Two Coasts, Lawing Gallery, Houston, USA
Four Generations, curated by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Woodbury University, Glendale, USA
Group Exhibition, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, USA
Julian's Show, curated by Julian Pretto, Littlejohn Contemporary, New York, USA
New York Abstract, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, USA
Abstract Painting, curated by Pat Steir, Christinerose Gallery, New York, USA

1994
Paint, The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, USA
Contemporary Abstract Painting, Grant Gallery, Denver, Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, USA
Fall Group Exhibition, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Visiting Artistry, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Prints of Darkness, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Some Like it Cool, Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, USA

1993
Drawings From 55 Ferris Street, curated by Frederieke S. Taylor, Jessica Berwind Gallery, Philadelphia, USA
Summer Group Exhibition, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Single Frame, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Silent Echoes, curated by Christian Haub, Tennisport Arts, Long Island City, New York, USA
Abstrategies, curated by Genevieve Linnehan, Dunedin Fine Arts and Cultural Center, Tampa, USA

1992
Singular and Plural: Recent Accessions, Drawings & Prints 1945-1991, curated by Barry Walker, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA
Summer Becomes Eclectic, Mars Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
Contemporary Surfaces, curated by Rick Ward, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, USA
55 Ferris Street Show, curated by Frederieke S. Taylor, 55 Ferris Street, Brooklyn, USA
Eighties, John Gibson Gallery, New York, USA
The Clearobscure, Genovese Graphics Annex, Boston, USA
Essential Gestures, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, USA
Nancy Haynes, Mike Metz, Thomas Nozkowski, and Joyce Robins, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, Galleria Plurima, Milan, Italy

1991
American Abstraction at the Addison, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, USA
La Metafisica Della Luce, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Synthesis, John Good Gallery, New York, Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, USA
Drawing Exhibition, Stark Gallery, New York, USA
Monotypes from the Garner Tullis Workshop, Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, USA
Works on Paper, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
The Fetish of Knowledge, curated by James Hyde, Real Art Ways, Hartford, USA
AC Project Room, New York, USA
Monotypes, Galleria Plurima, Milan, Italy

1990
Artists for Amnesty, Blum Helman Gallery, New York, USA
A Question of Paint, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, USA
Act-Up Auction for Action Aids Benefit Exhibition, Paula Cooper Gallery, USA
Unique Works on Paper, curated by Werner H, Kramarsky, Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
Contemporary Fresco, Stark Gallery, New York, USA
Provocative Abstraction: New Painting New York, Karl Bornstein Gallery, Santa Monica, USA
Group Exhibition, Stark Gallery, New York, USA
Homage to the Square, Nohra Haime, New York, USA

1989
The Dark Sublime: Art at the End of Our Century, Scott Alan Gallery, USA
American Abstract Artists, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York, USA
Expressive Geometries, Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, USA
Post-Modern Painters, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Fundamental Abstraction, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, USA
Methods of Abstraction, Gallery Urban, New York, USA
The Mirror in which Two are Seen as One, Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, USA
Nonrepresentation: The Show of the Essay, curated by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Anne Plumb Gallery, New York, USA
Abstraction and Image: Drawing Within, Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, New York, USA
Slate, E.L. Stark Gallery, New York, USA

1988/89
New York Now, Esbo Museum of Art, Finland & Norrkopings Konstmuseum, Goteborgs Museum, Sunsvalls Museum, Sodertalje Konsthall, Sweden
The Presence of Abstraction, curated by Phyllis Plous, University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, Block Art Gallery, Northwestern University, Chicago, Desaisset Museum, Santa Clara, USA

1988
Real Abstract, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
The Gold Show, Genovese Graphics, Boston, USA
Nancy Haynes, Donald Judd, Carole Seborovski, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Out of Order, curated by Christian Haub, Anne Plumb Gallery, New York, USA
Formal, The Dart Gallery, Chicago, USA
The New Generation, curated by Werner H. Kramarsky, Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, USA
Black in the Light, Genovese Graphics, Boston, USA
Group Exhibition, Plus-Kern Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

1987
Lieu, Project D'Exposition, Liege, Belgium
Black, Eric Siegeltuch Gallery, New York, USA
Rigor, curated by Stephen Westfall, John Good Gallery, New York, USA
Abstract Painting, Asher-Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Plus-Kern '69-'86, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium
American Abstract Artists, New York Cultural Center, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, John Gibson Gallery, New York, USA

1986
Plus-Kern Gallery: Ten Years, Vereniging Museum, Hedenaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium
Geometry Now, curated by Ruth Kaufmann, Craig Cornelius Gallery, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Group Exhibition, curated by Lilly Wei, Kingsboro Community College, New York, USA

1985
Sculpture Center Group Exhibition, Ben Shahn Gallery, William Patterson College, New Jersey, USA
Abstract Issues, curated by Steven Henry Madoff, Oscarsson Hood Gallery, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, The Sculpture Center, New York, USA

1983
Benefit, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, Jourdan Arpelle Gallery, New York, USA
Artists Choose Artists, CDS Gallery, New York, USA

1982
Crucifix Show, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA
Benefit, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, USA
The First Ten Years of Collecting, The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, The Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA
Recent Acquisitions, Haags Gemeentsmuseum, The Hague, Holland

1981
Benefit, A.I.R. Gallery, New York, USA
Group Exhibition, Julian Pretto, Weehawken, New Jersey, USA
Gallery Artists, David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Heresies, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, USA
June Fever, Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, USA

1980
Inaugural Exhibition, David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada
In the Spirit of Constructivism, Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Group Exhibition, Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, USA

1978
Group Exhibition, curated by Poppy Johnson, The Hundred Dollar Gallery, New York, USA

2004
"Art for a Landmine Free World," Silent Auction, PaceWildenstein, October 2004, illustration

2002
Alfred MacAdam, "Nancy Haynes - Illusion and Absence - Paintings: exhibition catalogue, Galerie Hubert Winter, May - June

2001
Art Omni International, "Francis J. Greenburger Awards/2001," Lilly Wei on Nancy Haynes, illustration

2000
Wei, Lilly, "Nancy Haynes at Stark Gallery," Artnews, June
McDonough, Tom, "Nancy Haynes at Stark Gallery," Art in America, October

1999
Ebert, Hitrud, "Schone ote Spreache," Made in USA, Freitag 12, March
MacAdam, Barbara, "Something to Glow On," Artnews, Summer
Weidle, Barbara, "Letter from Barbara," Artnet.com, Summer

1998
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, "Endspace: From a real to an absolute - Nancy Haynes' paintings 1974 - 1998," Edition Fondation Leschot, Bern, Switzerland

1997
Petry, Michael. Art & Design - "A Thing of Beauty is... ", Profile No. 54, page 13, illustration Worth, Alexi. "After the Fall - Aspects of Abstract Painting since 1970," Artnews, October.
"After the Fall - Aspects of Abstract Painting since 1970," exhibition catalogue, Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY, curated by Lilly Wei, illustration

1996
Castle, Frederick, Ted. "Ronald Bladen, Nancy Haynes and Olivier Mosset," Review, AprFrank, Peter. ArtScene, April.
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Art & Design . "Cabbages, Raspberries and Video's Thin Brightness, - Painting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," Profile No. 48 (May/June), pages 14-23, illustration
Protzman, Ferdinand, "Minimalists with Maximum Skill," The Washington Post, June 8.

1995
Gilbert-Rolfe , Jeremy. "IIII Generations," exhibition catalogue, Woodbury University Art Gallery, Burbank, illustration
Lew Thomas. "New York Abstract," Contemporary Arts Center. exhibition catalogue, New Orleans, illustration Yau, John.
"Out of the Cul de Sac and into the Fire," exhibition catalogue for Abstraction from Two Coasts, Lawing Gallery, March, illustration

1994
MacAdam, Barbara. "Nancy Haynes," Artnews, January, Page 160
Wilson Lloyd, Ann. "Nancy Haynes," Art in America , May

1993
Arts & Antiques, Openings. October, Page 24, illustration
Tema Celeste, " Nancy Haynes," Winter, Number 39
Welish, Marjorie. "A Literature of Silence," exhibition catalog for the John Good Gallery, September

1992
Aporetical Incident. Tema Celeste, April - May, illustration Barnes, Curt.
"Travels Along the Dialectic: Hit-and-Run Observations on Interdimensionality," College Art Association
Carrier, David. "Afterlight: Exhibition Abstract Painting in the Era of Its Belatedness," Arts, March
Clark, Trinkett "Parameters: Nancy Haynes," exhibition publication, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, April - June
Handy, Ellen. "Nancy Haynes: New York in Review," Arts, January, Page 75
McGreevy, Linda. "Opposing Views," Port Folio, Page 27
"Abstraction as," illustration, Tema Celeste
Pardee, Hearne. "Nancy Haynes," Artnews, January, Page 129, illustration
Taylor, Frederieke. "55 Ferris Street," exhibition catalog, May, New York, NY
Welish, Marjorie. "Abstraction, Advocacy of," Tema Celeste January - March, Page 94-95

1991
Art Journal, Spring, Volume 50, Number 1, Page 30, illustration
Litterfield, Kinney. "Filling the Primal Paradoxes ," Press-Telegram, Long Beach, Sunday, December 8, Page J6, illustration
Reynolds, Jock. "American Abstraction At The Addison," Exhibition Catalog for theAddison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Page 64, illustration

1990
Brenson, Michael. "Nancy Haynes," The New York Times, May 18
Carrier, David. "Extending the Language of Abstraction," Art International, Autumn, Page 61
Enders, Alexandra. "Space Shapers: Contemporary Artists Structure Their
Past and Document the Present," Art & Antiques, May, Page 51, illustration
New Observations, No. 73, January - February, Page 17, illustration

1989
Baker, Kenneth. "Abstract Jestures," Artforum, , September, Page 134-38, illustration
Baker, Kenneth. San Francisco Chronicle, June 24
Fine, Amy and Collins, Bradley Jr." Nancy Haynes at John Good," Art in America, March, Page 147, illustration
Galligan, Gregory. "Rescripting The Sublime ," Art International, Summer, Pages 56-58, illustration
Gilbert-Rolfe,Jeremy. The Current State of Nonrepresentation, Vision Arts Quarterly, Spring, Pages 3-7, illustration
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. "Nancy Haynes," April
Smith, Roberta. "The East Village's Art Galleries are Alive in SoHo," The New York Times, January Page 19
Zimmer, William. "The Poetic and the Visual," The New York Times, April 2, Page 22
Zimmer, William, "Nancy Haynes," Artnews

1988
"A Debate on Abstraction," catalog for Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, New York, NY, December
Braff, Phillis. "New Generation Shows Its Colors," The New York Times, May 22, Page 26
Cyphers, Peggy. "Nancy Haynes,"Arts, September, Pages 101-102, illustration
"Formal," catalog for Dart Gallery, Chicago, IL, November
Gilbert-Rolfe,Jeremy. "Nonrepresentation in 1988: Meaning-Production Beyond the Scope of the Pious," Arts, May, Page 33, illustration
"New York Now," Catalog for Norrkopings Konstmuseum, Sweden, November
Ramael, Greet. Knack, review, Belgium, January 27
Spector, Nancy. "Rigor," Artscribe, January - February, Pages 68-69

1987
Van Den Abeele, Lieven. De Standaard, review, Belgium, January 23
Wei, Lilly. "Talking Abstract: Part Two," Art in America, December, , Pages 118-119

1986
Raynor, Vivian. "Geometry Now," The New York Times, October 3
Silverthorne ,Jeanne. "Nancy Haynes," Artforum, review, November

1985
Austin, Charles. NYB, January, illustration
Bell, Jane. Artnews, September
Bool, Flip. Museumjounal, (The Hague, Holland)
Brenson ,Michael. "Nancy Haynes," The New York Times, January 18

1985
Minne, Florent. De Standaard, Brussels, Belgium, May 6
Peters, Philip. De Tijd, (The Hague, Holland), April 26
Pulchri (museum publication), Haags Gemeentemuseum, March
VanSanten, Ingrid. Het Binnenhut, The Hague, Holland, March 30
Watkins, Eileen. Star Ledger, New Jersey. April 14
Westfall, Stephen. "Nancy Haynes at John Gibson," Art in America, November
Zimmer, William. The New York Times, April 2

1984
"1984 Winter," Catalog for P.S. 1, January, illustration
Saxon, Erik. "Appearances," No. 10, Winter Issue, illustration

1983
Brooks, Valerie F. Arts Extra, WBAI-FM Radio, June 24
Flam,Jack. Artists Choose Artists, June
Glueck, Grace. The New York Times, December 10
Mays, John Bentley The Globe and the Mail, January 14
Mays, John Bentley. The Globe and the Mail, February 26
Pulchri, Haags. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Holland, January
Russell, John. The New York Times, June 10
ABCRIT - JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE WRITES ON NANCY HAYNES AT REGINA REX, NEW YORK - 2017
ABCRIT - Jeremy Gilbert-Rofle
April 01, 2017
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HYPERALLERGIC - Nancy Haynes nous invites à regarder de plus près - 2017
HYPERALLERGIC - John Yau
January 01, 2017
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ART NEWS - Nancy Haynes - 2013
ART NEWS - Suzanne Muchnic
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LOS ANGELES TIME - The sensual intelligence of Nancy Haynes - 2012
LOS ANGELES TIME - Leah Ollman
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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Haynes is worth getting to know - 2010
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Kenneth Baker
May 15, 2010
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Feed the Meter Vol. 2
Feed the Meter Vol. 2
December 12, 2017