Patrick Dean Hubbell makes materials dance

SANTA FE — Patrick Dean Hubbell’s “And Still, We Persevere” at Gerald Peters Contemporary is a tour de force of sculptural painting, or painterly sculpture.

Unstretched canvases in a dizzying array of colors and patterns drape and overlap throughout the gallery. Hubbell has cut the bottom edges of some of them into long rows of fringe, reminiscent of Diné dance regalia. He uses beads, too, which look like traditional beadwork if you blur your eyes, but he pours the beads directly into wet paint or glue, as opposed to hand-stitching them. He also uses Diné weaving motifs, like crosses and chevrons, but instead of weaving, he paints them, fast and loose, letting the paint drip as he works.

The net effect is that Hubbell’s art feels alive with vertiginous motion. Like Jackson Pollock and the other action painters who were often compared to improvisational dancers, Hubbell shows us his process with marks that record his own bodily movements. And while the works are not explicitly figurative, the fringe and beading does reference clothing, and their unusual shapes could be interpreted as leaping, twirling dancers.

Hubbell’s titles allude to a “you” and an “us” who have a longstanding relationship of some sort, and who have survived tough times together, reinforcing the figurative reading of the work. With pieces like “When It Seems Impossible, You Hold It All Together for Us” and “You Showed Us How to Keep Going Past Failed Attempts,” experiences of shared struggle and ultimate triumph are encoded within the works’ fragmentation and visual exuberance, respectively.

The central installation consists of 24 unstretched abstract paintings hanging in limp cones above anthill-shaped mounds of sand. Although more static than Hubbell’s other compositions, it has the sacred stillness of a memorial.

Hubbell uses a variety of natural earth pigments, which he harvests from the land surrounding his family’s Navajo Nation homestead, but he also uses brighter, commercially-produced paint, including spray paint. Each of the 24 canvases in the installation could have been made by a different artist. One looks like a Cy Twombly, another like a Sam Gilliam. Others take inspiration from Diné weavings. But anyone familiar with Hubbell’s work will recognize the particular combination of styles as uniquely his own.

The floating canvases could be interpreted as Phyllida Barlow-style flags, but I saw them more as ancestral spirits, floating above the ashes and dust of their former bodies. Perhaps they’re the spirits of artists — Native and non-Native alike – who have influenced Hubbell. The sand is also likely a reference to Diné sand painting, which is performed as part of healing ceremonies, and which Hubbell has cited as an influence on his work. Diné sand painting, like Tibetan sand painting, is traditionally an ephemeral art, with the sand swept away when the ceremony is finished. Such undertones of ephemerality are fitting for a process-oriented show where the materials themselves seem caught in a state of eternal becoming — forever provisional and unfinished.

I first saw Hubbell’s work at Candice Madey in New York City in 2023. That space was much smaller — a second-floor walk-up — and the works were smaller. They were also more rectilinear and wall-bound than these. But at the time, I was amazed by how he could make such clashing colors and patterns feel harmonious — something only Joyce Kozloff, Al Loving, Sigmar Pölke, Sanford Biggers and a handful of other artists have ever been able to pull off.

At the time, I didn’t recognize the Indigenous elements of the work. The zigzag patterns, which I thought may have been inspired by the Russian constructivist textile art of Lyubov Popova or the op art paintings of Bridget Riley, are, in fact, traditional Diné symbols for lightning. Of course, they may be referencing those Western art traditions, as well. One of the remarkable things about Hubbell is how he pulls from multiple sources without letting himself feel weighed down by any one tradition. He mixes and remixes with aplomb.

Seeing Hubbell’s new work in a much larger space two years later, I am excited by how much more sculptural it has become. The older stuff felt relatively neat and tidy, too, like freshly pressed laundry, whereas the new work is exhilaratingly rough and tumble — almost alive. It’s a great new direction, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Patrick Dean Hubbell makes materials dance

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.