En Route – Three Women Artists: Meg Hitchcock, Rifka Milder, Ketta Ioannidou

Abstraction is almost always en route—a journey toward a plastic intellection on canvas or paper. For the brilliant Josef Albers, a simple geometric shape like a square was closer to nature than nature’s visual appearance itself. His path to abstraction was one of perpetual transition; hence, he created a series of brilliant squares within squares—yet he was never finished. For Barnett Newman, abstraction was about bridging internal and external spaces. For Mark Rothko, it was a means of channeling anxieties and struggles through emotional renditions. Joan Mitchell infused her work with synesthetic reverberations, while Lee Krasner created a coalescence of psychological algorithms and nature itself.

Artists Rifka Milder, Meg Hitchcock, and Ketta Ioannidou each navigate their own paths within abstraction, discovering unique visual vocabularies along the way. Rifka harnesses bold brushstrokes and warm colors to articulate her experiences with nature. Meg Hitchcock densely populates her surfaces with solid, beam-like abstract patterns, reimagining the sacred within the human psyche. Ketta Ioannidou finds poetry in nature, internalizing its essence before translating it onto the canvas in a poetic order.

En Route is a vibrant group exhibition featuring three women artists who have lived and breathed abstract art throughout their New York lives. In a city where abstract languages span from Jackson Pollock to Sam Gilliam, from Helen Frankenthaler to Julie Mehretu, the challenge of finding one’s own voice amidst this dynamic artistic milieu is both daunting and exhilarating.

Rifka Milder’s artistic practice is a form of self-healing. Through heavy, gestural brushstrokes, she constructs color bodies, fully immersing herself in the process while pushing the limits of her dexterity. Her work boldly experiments with color motifs, drawing from two seemingly opposing sources: the luminous palettes of Pierre Bonnard and the intricate vibrancy of Persian miniatures. Though her destinations remain elusive, her paintings strike with an undeniable intensity.

Meg Hitchcock explores the poetry of the divine through her acrylic works on paper. How does one translate sacred script into a purely visual form? What happens when a verse from the Bhagavad Gita is painted without its linguistic or figurative meaning? Hitchcock’s paintings engage with such inquiries, offering abstract visual analogies of profound spiritual principles. Works like ‘You Are the Vanishing Point’ and The Recognition and Dissolution of Mental Constructs transform language into something pictorially abstract, distilling meaning beyond words.

Ketta Ioannidou, though based in Brooklyn, continuously carries Nicosia, Cyprus, in her paintings. Her Mediterranean heritage surfaces through recurring memories of landscapes, which she categorizes into imagery within her studio. Her archetypal memories remain tethered to the land, water, and sky of her childhood. Like Citizen Kane’s enigmatic ‘Rosebud,’ Ioannidou’s flowers dissolve onto the canvas, their petals transformed into paint smears. Her paintings serve as bridges to the past, impervious visual testaments to memory and place.

The three artists, each en route through abstraction, drift toward uncharted visions, fluid interpretations, and the ever-shifting essence of expression.

-Ebenezer Singh