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The festive look of these richly textured shaped canvases—blanketed with brightly colored impasto hatching or encrusted with confetti—belie the difficulties that this artist faced in producing them. Pindell’s Autobiography series was made during a fifteen-year period following a car accident, in 1979, from which she suffered serious memory loss. Punctuating the surfaces of these handsome abstractions are seams—fissures, really—bridged by stitches resembling little teeth, and fragments of photographs and postcards. They lend the paint-toughened surfaces a pieced-together fragility and form their swirling and fanning interior structures. The found imagery, emerging from dense areas of acrylic color, includes disembodied hands, a frog, and a statue of Shiva. Neither random nor coherent, the fragments seem to represent the impressionistic puzzle pieces of partial recollection, which the compositions dynamically integrate into a meaningfully illogical whole.

— Johanna Fateman

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