I carry my landscapes around with me focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell's
large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s. Mitchell's exploration of the
possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously
create continuity and rupture while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or
the memory of landscapes. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the
course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground
relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers resulting in
intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals
observations places and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as one of
the towering achievements of the postwar period. Published on the occasion of the eponymous
exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019 this book offers a unique opportunity to explore
the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell's extensive
body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole
but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and
brushwork. In the complementing essays Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries borders and edges
in Mitchell's multipanel paintings beginning with her first work of this kind The Bridge
(1956) considering them as both physical and conceptual objects Robert Slifkin discusses the
dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist's paintings in relation to works by Monet and
Willem de Kooning among others.
