Only a few days remain to check out the epic paintings of legendary California-based artist Squeak Carnwath (American, b. 1947) in her fourth solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, Goddess of All. With a focus on paintings made between 2022 and 2025, Carnwath’s heroically-scaled compositions are enriched with a combination of imagery and text operating as pedagogical signposts on the multifarious nature behind womanhood. Goddess of All makes for an impactful title of this show, not only for its memorability, but more so in its encapsulation of a core thematic tenet intrinsic to the vastness of womanhood: the feminine divine.
Carnwath’s paintings have a conceptual bent to their execution given the coexistence of figurative and abstract imagery alongside text, a marriage of the aesthetic and the metaphysical. A painting like Ancestors and Future Ghosts (2023) honors matrilineal heritage with its buoyant descriptions of female archetypes: mothers, daughters, sisters, women, goddesses, witches, shamans. Interspersed among these words are depictions of Ancient Greco-Roman statuary of goddesses, with the recognizable silhouette of the Venus de Milo twice appearing as the largest of them all (also a recurring motif in a few other works throughout this show). A work like this became an emphatic statement on the need to look to the ancients for wisdom and inspiration, to harken back through time from a matriarchal lineage.
