The pairing of paintings by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz in Intersection at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects was a stroke of genius. Opening a week after A Planar Garden, curated by Stephen Westfall, closed at Alexandre Gallery, Intersection is another reminder that planar abstraction is thriving, even if the art world seldom focuses on it. Both Church and Hankwitz, longtime practitioners of geometric abstraction, incorporate curving lines, which sets them apart from the hard lines and forms that characterized Westfall’s exhibition, and both use black as a color, After that, however, the differences become more interesting than the similarities. Church’s three paintings in the exhibition mark a break from her best-known work, geometric abstractions that allude to the female body. Even in the painting “Untitled (Undressed)” (2024), a viewer would be hard pressed to call the outlined, rounded shapes “humanlike.” If you insist on reading them as buttocks — and that is certainly your prerogative — Church has placed them around various irregular, sharply angled black and white forms. These forms, like ones in the other two paintings, are difficult to read as purely geometric. That ambiguity imbues the works with a sense of tension, as they never become fully representational or abstract. Jenny Hankwitz, “Heartbeat” (2024), oil on canvasFans who liked Church’s lighthearted, unsettling, naughty humor (myself among them as I included her work in a show I curated for the Maryland Institute of Art in 2002 ) might be surprised — these recent paintings have shed their humor as well as the sly bodily references. Yet their elusiveness carries them into a new perceptual dimension in which innuendo — the connection between the purely visual and the discursive — is no longer the main charge. The separation from language adds depth to Church’s paintings and opens up a new territory.Jenny Hankwitz’s sinuous abstractions consist of elongated, bulbous forms twisting around each other. Working with a limited palette of four to five colors, the artist composes interlocking, overlapping, and emerging shapes whose interior logic never discloses itself. This resistance to interpretation, which she shares with Church, is one of her strong points, particularly because the work hints at things enough to refuse the label of pure abstraction.What I particularly like about Hankwitz’s work is that I can see no obvious precedent. She seems to have found her own way to abstraction, without the influence of any celebrated predecessors, such as Frank Stella, Al Held, or Ellsworth Kelly. A tenuous connection to late Henri Matisse is evident, but to focus on that would be a disservice to Hankwitz since her forms do not seem to come from nature.Amanda Church, “Untitled (Everybody)” (2024), oil on canvas (photo John Goodrich)The distinguishing characteristic of Hankwitz’s painting is everything it seems to be in motion. Tubular forms swell and contract. The shifting figure-ground relationship is difficult to discern. Are we looking at color, shape, or a flat object? Color will change between edges, even as the shape continues. All the interruptions keep our eye moving. In Hankwitz’s paintings, unidentifiable things and abstract forms switch identities. The artist’s bulbous tubular forms share something with Abstract Expressionism’s paint-as-paint pours. Like Pollock’s late abstractions, Hankwitz’s art expands beyond the painting’s edges. We glimpse a fluid world of shapes in circular and wave-like motion whose inner workings we do not quite grasp. The solidity of Church’s and Hankowitz’s paintings is undeniable. Both of them have followed their own trajectory without surrendering to the pressures around them. Doing that over a long stretch of time is not as easy as it sounds. Jenny Hankwitz, “Finding Rhythm” (2024), oil on canvasAmanda Church, “Untitled (Two Legs)” (2024), oil on canvas (photo John Goodrich)Jenny Hankwitz, “Dont Get Me Wrong” (2024), oil on canvasIntersection: Abstractions by Amanda Church and Jenny Hankwitz continues at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.