In Dialogue
The retrospective of Bascha Mon’s paintings at Tappeto Volante offers a focused look at an artist whose career has been shaped by both creative achievements and personal struggles. Mon first gained recognition in the 1970s and 80s, with numerous exhibitions and critical acclaim. However, her trajectory was interrupted by health challenges that led to a long period of seclusion. During this time, she continued to work from her basement studio in New Jersey, expanding her creative vocabulary across various mediums while remaining largely out of the public eye. In recent years, Mon turned to digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Paola Gallio, the exhibition curator and gallery co-founder, describes this phase as “dissolving the physical isolation that had once defined her situation.” These platforms allowed Mon to reconnect with the art community and sustain an active, visible presence. Gallio emphasizes that “Mon’s modest basement studio became a metaphor for boundless creative space,” where the constraints of physical isolation were replaced by the limitless possibilities of virtual engagement. For deeper insights into the retrospective, Gallio’s interview with Art Spiel offers further reflections on Mon’s artistic journey and the significance of this exhibition.
Tell us about the genesis of this exhibition.
Our first introduction to Mon’s work came through artist JJ Manford, a co-founder of Tappeto Volante, along with Jared Deery and Elisa Soliven. JJ had maintained a creative dialogue with Mon on social media and suggested her participation in our annual January epic group show La Banda. Mon enthusiastically accepted the invitation, but unfortunately, a serious health complication hospitalized her a month before the show. Even in recovery, Mon’s determination remained unshaken. As soon as she woke up, she sent me a voice message urging me to find a way to retrieve her drawings from her studio. Touched by her resilience, I drove to Long Valley, New Jersey, where her son and newly appointed assistant opened her studio to me. As soon as I set foot into the studio I realized I was guided through a lifetime of work. What a privilege!
On my drive back, I was profoundly moved by the significance of this moment. The weight of it struck me—how often the legacy of women, especially those who have worked within the male-dominated world of art, risks being forgotten or overlooked. I called Amy Mascena, an artist friend to share the profound experience and the disappointment to know that all that work would be forgotten if none would step up to show it, and she said to me, “Don’t you have a gallery, silly girl?” Though initially uncertain whether our space in Brooklyn could do justice to Mon’s work, I realized the importance of offering her the recognition she deserved. Once Mon’s health improved, I mustered the courage to propose a solo exhibition. She graciously accepted, and this marked the beginning of our collaboration.
This exhibition represents Bascha Mon’s first solo show in New York City in nearly five decades. It is the culmination of Mon’s long and perseverant artistic journey, deeply informed by her explorations of identity, migration, and nature. Spanning over 50 years of work, this retrospective not only celebrates Mon’s career but also highlights her contributions to feminist discourse. The timing felt right to honor her life’s work and offer audiences an immersive experience into the depth and significance of her artistic legacy.
The show spans from the 1970s till present. What was your curatorial approach?
My curatorial approach was driven by an intuitive and thoughtful process, balancing the challenge of encapsulating a lifetime of work within the confines of two modest 13 × 15 feet rooms. Summarizing Mon’s extensive artistic output in such a space required careful deliberation. Following an extensive and immersive studio visit, we collectively decided to feature works that reflect key phases of her career: a selection from her most renowned series on Homasote from the 1970s and 80s, paintings created between the late 1990s and 2015, and her three most recent drawings, completed after her recovery from her recent hospitalization as I felt crucial to show the energy in these three drawings.
Reverberations (1978) is the only painting that remains from Bascha Mon’s last solo exhibition in New York, held in 1977 at Lee Ault & Co. I retrieved it from her living room after the entire show had sold out. This work marks a significant departure from her earlier pieces of the 1970s to a color field approach. By including Reverberations in this exhibition, I aimed to create a bridge between Mon’s last New York solo show and the present, serving as a portal of continuity that connects past and present while highlighting the evolution of her artistic journey.
The curatorial strategy sought to highlight the evolution of Mon’s artistic language while preserving the continuity of the core themes that have defined her practice over five decades. Central to this approach was creating a dialogue between her earlier and more recent works, emphasizing both her growth as an artist and the recurrence of motifs, such as the intersection of personal identity with broader collective experiences.
Please guide us through the show. What are some milestones in Mon’s work?
The exhibition is arranged in reverse chronological order, starting with Bascha Mon’s recent works on paper and paintings from 2024 to 1998 in the first room and continuing into the second room, which features pieces from 1980 to 1972. One of the hidden gems of the show is a painting from 1968 that didn’t make it to the main exhibition walls but is kept in the gallery’s back area. I like to think of it as the ghost track on a record.
The exhibition begins with Mon’s early works from the 1970s, Prince Street period, where her paintings are marked by a fluid integration of form and color and relate to the garment store that her immigrant parents established in Newark, migrating from east Europe. These works reveal Mon’s investigation into the interplay between sheer and opaque hues, with a tactile quality reminiscent of fabric patterning. Color in these early pieces is not just a compositional element but the central subject of inquiry, imbued with symbolic meaning.
As her practice evolved in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mon expanded her palette to include more vibrant tones and dynamic gestures, as seen in her Maps + Games and Recollection series. These works reflect her deep engagement with the materiality of paint, using stains and brushstrokes to explore spatial dynamics and emotional depth. Often evoking aerial perspectives, the pieces fluidly shift between abstraction and representation, creating landscape-like compositions with a fabric-like texture.
The 1990s and 2000s represent a period of further experimentation for Mon. Her work during these decades maintains a focus on spontaneity and fluidity, extending across paintings, installations, and sculptures. In this era, she frequently employed expansive, sweeping gestures of saturated color, creating dynamic compositions that appeared to grow organically from a central piece. These works are often surrounded by smaller, related pieces that either burst outward or seem to emerge from the larger canvas. Mon’s use of color recalls techniques from color field painting, including the pouring of paint, underscoring her dedication to exploring the sensory dimensions of color and its emotional resonance.
Mon’s later works on paper from the 2010s and 2020s continue to place color at the forefront. In these compositions, she juxtaposes rigid geometric forms with soft, amorphous, cloud-like shapes that seem to hover across the surface. The tension between sheer and opaque tones reflects her ongoing engagement with the natural world, as well as her continued inquiry into the perceptual and conceptual boundaries of color. In this way, Mon elevates color to an autonomous subject, emphasizing its fundamental role in her artistic practice.
This retrospective not only highlights milestones in Mon’s career but also illustrates the evolution of her visual language over more than five decades, from the intimate to the political, from abstraction to representation, all while maintaining a profound commitment to the exploration of color and form.
What can you tell us about Mon’s painting process?
Bascha Mon’s artistic journey over the past 60 years has been shaped by numerous phases of evolution, each marked by significant personal and creative milestones. Her path to becoming a painter is a story of perseverance and a deep passion for color, which has remained the central element of her work. Mon’s entry into the world of painting began unexpectedly when her friend Olga, recognizing her affinity for color, suggested that the only way to truly engage with it was through painting. Olga gifted Bascha her first set of art supplies and asked her to replicate a Monet painting, a moment that ignited Bascha’s artistic calling and inspired her to begin formal training.
Despite early resistance from her husband, who disapproved of her artistic pursuits, Mon enrolled in classes, first in New Jersey under the mentorship of Adolf Konrad and later at the Art Students League in New York. There, she encountered mixed responses. Although the legendary Philip Guston recommended her for the New York Studio School, Mercedes Matter, founder of the school, dismissed her application, doubting that a housewife with two children could become a serious artist. This rejection, though painful, did not deter Bascha’s determination to pursue her passion for color and form.
At the Art Students League, Mon found inspiration in Wassily Kandinsky, particularly his exploration of the relationship between color and music, ideas that would deeply influence her work. In her early years of painting, Mon worked in a windowless basement studio, where she installed bright neon lights to illuminate her space. This artificial lighting influenced the light tones of her early works on Homesote, a highly absorbent and textured material that gave her pieces a fresco-like quality. She later remarked that when she first saw her paintings in natural light, they appeared entirely different, which added a Duchampian element “casualty” to the work. The distinctive texture of Homesote also shaped her technique giving a fresco-like softness to the layers of the paintings.
In the late 1980s, Mon suffered a nerve injury that temporarily limited her ability to paint with her dominant hand. During her rehabilitation, she temporarily drew with her left hand, which led to a significant shift in her process. Transitioning to canvas, her brushstrokes became more fluid and gestural, and her engagement with color grew bolder and more adventurous. As Mon regained strength, her work entered a new phase marked by increased confidence and dynamism in her use of color.
Social media also played a crucial role in Mon’s later career. Engaging in rich conversations with other painters on platforms like Facebook, she broadened her artistic references and developed new approaches to her practice. A pivotal moment in her career came in 2018 with the creation of her large-scale project New Land, a series of over 280 works on paper that critically examines immigration and the multiracial dynamics shaping the United States. This series, created while listening to the contemporary classical music of Olivier Messiaen, reconnected Mon with the synesthetic relationship between color and music that had first drawn her to Kandinsky’s work. The influence of Messiaen’s use of octatonic scales—musical structures built on alternating semitones and whole tones—brought a new layer of complexity to Mon’s exploration of color, deepening the connection between her visual and auditory experiences.
Mon continues to find inspiration in the fusion of color and music, a defining element of her creative practice. Recently, while I was listening to Radiohead’s guitarist Johnny Greenwood, who incorporates Olivier Messiaen’s octatonic scales into his compositions, Mon’s work struck me as embodying a similar harmonic tension between structure and spontaneity.
I often refer to Bascha as a “rockstar” of the art world, and this dynamic integration of music and color proves it!
All photos courtesy of Tappeto Volante Projects.
Bascha Mon Solo Show at Tappeto Volante through October 27th, 2024