Lynne Woods Turner, “One Thing and Another”

by Matthew Kangas

Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon

Continuing through February 28, 2026

Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #9559,” 2025, oil and pencil on linen over panel, 10 x 8”. All images of Turner are courtesy of Adams and Ollman, Portland.

In a tiny alcove near the back of the exhibition is a projection of a three-and-one-half minute videotape titled “Spanish Dance” (1973), choreographed by Trisha Brown for female dancers in her company. This proves to be the key to understanding Lynne Woods Turner’s new work, twenty thin-line abstract drawings on a variety of papers. The quiet simplicity of Turner’s small format works on paper (rarely exceeding 12 inches) releases a variety of linear combinations that distantly echo the movements of Brown’s dancers, often linked together sideways, shuffling their feet to the music. They reveal the breadth of the artist’s imagination — each one is completely different — underscoring the wide approbation of her oeuvre since her debut in 1976.

Now 75 and based in Portland, Turner’s dedication to a strict yet personal abstraction stresses the inexhaustibility of abstract art at a time when representation dominates much of contemporary art. One reason for her particular durability may be seen in the “Spanish Dance” series: almost all, each in their own way, bear a figurative association to the female body. Parallel curves, winding hemispheres, circles and floral outlines can be seen as abstracted legs, buttocks, heads and breasts. Differing types of pencil color, paper backgrounds, and configurations of patterns are inspired by the collective movements of the dancers’ bodies as they cling to one another, twisting and turning.

Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1871,” 2024, pencil on paper, 8 x 5 3/8”.

Turner’s response to the dancers’ bodies is stripped down to basic outlines lent expression with a pleasing mixture of red lines, green lines, grey and black strokes, all repeated in patterns within each drawing. Both breasts and buttocks are evoked in “Untitled #9559” (2024) while tall bodies in tight profile are implicit in “Untitled #1130” (2014). Each image obliquely emulates the corporeal formations to be seen in the video of Trisha Brown’s choreography. Both breasts and genitalia amusingly punctuate a hidden grid format in “Untitled #1871” (2024).

On another level, tic-tac-toe-like grids are completed with filled-in random numbers as in “Untitled #1676” (2023), which is enriched by ink as well as colored pencils and graphite. With such apparently mathematical systems, Turner’s approach recalls the British artist Christopher John Watts, who was influenced by the original Systems Group (1969-1976) of English artists who valued “constructivist, non-figurative and mathematically driven art.” Watts has taught at Washington State University since 1988 (he has since retired) and exhibited widely in the Pacific Northwest. Turner’s drawings, with their numbers, signs, lines and grids, are close to Watts’ although in his painted-wood sculptures he takes numerical systems further.

Lynne Woods Turner, “Untitled #1676,” 2023, pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 4 3/8 x 4 3/8”.

Nevertheless, the tiny size of Turner’s number drawings forces an intimate encounter that renders them more subjective than Watts’ constructions. They beg to be deciphered while they delight the eye with pink lines and numbers appearing at the intersections of the grid boxes. Turner’s work is thus more enigmatic, even as it lacks Watts’ intellectual heft. They remain more mystery than formula.

A 2017 essay by Sarah Sentilles, written as part of the Oregon Visual Arts Ecology Project, is titled “Abstract Art as Political Art: Lynne Woods Turner.” Despite her condensed, ambitious argument, she fails to convince us of Turner’s political content and raises the wider question, “Can any abstract art be political?” Sentilles argues that Turner’s hidden allusions to the female body and such women’s work as textile weaving and embroidery constitute political subjects. Maybe so, but I’m not buying it. These insights may provide biographical background for Turner, but they do not add up to political content for her blessedly ambiguous drawings, even when they abstract women’s bodies. Subjectivity alone is an ample aesthetic defense, one not in need of political or social justification to justify its existence and its quality.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.