Yvonne Jacquette: From the Air at Karma

At Karma in Chelsea, "From the Air" is the gallery's first solo exhibition of Yvonne Jacquette (1934–2023). It brings together paintings and works on paper made between 1971 and 2016 and follows more than five decades in which she looked at the world from above, turning clouds, cities and cultivated fields into interlocking patterns of line and color. The show runs through October 31.

Her aerial vision grew out of a long interest in unusual vantage points. In the 1960s she painted her surroundings at oblique angles: through windows, down toward her son's toys on the floor, up at the ceilings of her Manhattan loft. After a 1969 flight to San Diego she turned to more vertiginous views. The early watercolor Airplane Window, Clouds and Hills (c. 1976) shows clouds above a patchwork of green and beige fields, framed by the oval of a plane window. In the pastel Madison Paper Co. (1988) the frame disappears and an industrial scene tilts upward toward the viewer. She returned to it a year later in the oil Madison Paper Co. II, recasting it in vivid color and broken brushwork.

From the mid-1970s she sought out new bird's-eye views, chartering planes over Maine, riding helicopters above Manhattan at night and drawing from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. She worked first in charcoal and pastel, reducing what passed below to shapes, patterns and blocks of color, and later used memory and imagination to turn those studies into Pointillist-like paintings. Trips to Colorado, California, Hong Kong and elsewhere brought each place's terrain and infrastructure into her compositions. The nocturne Route One, Maine (2008) is tipped on its axis so that it seems to climb skyward, its lights haloed and blurred, scattered across the dark ground like stars.

In her late years she kept painting, but no longer from aircraft altitude, bringing her elevated perspective down to earth. In a 1989 interview she described her work as moving from a high, detached position toward the evidence of figures in daily life.

The exhibition also includes the original maquette for the second volume of Aerial, the literary journal Jacquette and Edwin Denby published in 1981 with contributions from John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett and Peter Schjeldahl, among others. The maquette turned up in her former studio. A facsimile, Aerial (vol. II), has been published by Karma Books with the Estate of Yvonne Jacquette.