The mostly abstract painter Suzanne Caporael’s eighth show at Miles McEnery offers an excellent exposure to her direct, but not simple, nonobjective lyricism, often linked to nature. Her work consists of images and patterns that sometimes lean in the direction of feasible recognition, but, generally, the paintings enact schemes that are delightful in their own right, without being accessible in a realist sense.

On April 8, 2020, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships, including artist Suzanne Caporael. 

The New York Studio School presents Known: Unknown, an exhibition that brings together power players of painting today and emerging creators of tomorrow. We invited a select group of prominent artists to participate in this exhibition, with an added twist—each invited artist chose one emerging or lesser known artist to also be included in the show.

Opening Reception: Thu, November 01, 2018, 6:00PM - 8:00PM

The FLAG Art Foundation presents The Times from June 1 – August 11, 2017, on its 9th floor gallery. The exhibition uses The New York Times as its point of departure and features over 80 artists, artist duos, and collectives who use the “paper of record” to address and reframe issues that impact our everyday lives.

Reading The New York Times is embedded in many people’s daily routines. This chronicle of geopolitical and local issues, tragedies, human interest stories, and trends in culture, serves as both a source of inspiration and medium for artists to assert their perspectives on the state of the world. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, where news media was deemed the “the enemy of the people,” and The New York Times directly attacked and labeled as “fake news,” FLAG began developing an exhibition examining how seminal artists, such as Robert Gober, Ellsworth Kelly, Lorraine O’Grady, Fred Tomaselli, and others, who have used and been inspired by this newspaper in their practice. To give voice to a larger community, FLAG put out an open call for artist submissions that received 400+ proposals from around the world, and accounts for over half of the artists featured in the exhibition.

Opening reception: Saturday 29 July, 5-8pm

The paintings in this exhibition, SITE/SIGHT, are rooted in direct observation and are influenced by each artist’s perceptual practice and long-cultivated process of close study. Falling along a continuum between abstraction and representation they evoke a strong sense of place in the everyday world. Although we may not recognize the specific motif inferred (landscape, night sky, city, etc.) the authority of perception is tangible.

Sites, subjects, and methods of observation are critical to each artist’s visual language: planted fields, elevations seen from an airplane window, gradations of color in a sky reflected on a watery plane, shapes glanced at through apertures between buildings, or the puzzle of shapes in a tapestry-like world are some of the inspirations for the paintings shown here. Often the focus is upon a fragment of a larger subject or on an aspect removed from its larger context, adding an interesting ambiguity to the work.

Suzanne Caporael, Martha Diamond, Sharon Horvath, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Ellen Kozak, and Joyce Robins are painters in whose work abstraction conveys the resonance of close observation and place.

by Will Heinrich

Suzanne Caporael’s latest paintings — she numbers them sequentially, with the current show’s being in the low 700s — are divided into flat, irregular blocks of deep color with slightly blurry edges. The blocks themselves might pass for recessive Rothkos, pulling in a viewer’s gaze instead of glowing out to meet it. But the compositions as a whole look more like rice paddies at night. They’re distinctly horizontal in effect despite hanging on the wall, and the narrow boundaries between colors have all the silent force of property lines.

Suzanne Caporael to produce new work at Tandem Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison in Summer 2015 as well as at Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico in Summer 2015.

Rod Penner's small, meticulously painted landscapes of Texas and its environs, all from the last three years, pack a hefty amount of big sky and small town into their abbreviated formats. Penner pictures cafes (including a beautiful one showing a neon "Mexican Food" sign's reflection shimmering green on the rain-slicked surface of the parking lot), as well as convenience stores, laundromats, garages, houses along highways, nondescript main streets, and strip malls. Numerous gas stations are shown that might or might not be abandoned.

There are worse things you could do with The New York Times than cut blocks of color out of its photos and advertisements and glue them together, as Suzanne Caporael does, into elegant, postcard-size, abstract collages. In 028 (like calculus), five superimposed sections make a neat white frame around a vertical bicolor of violet-black and pale blue. A golden yellow curver sinks down from the top toward a white square with a muddy purple corner folded in. A slightly muddled edge above the darker half, three round bumps at the bottom, faint white lines where the framing newsprint covers another piece's edge, some type on the verso just barely showing through, and the partial date - the piece was made this year, sometime after the 10th of a month ending in "y" - all pull together, as curated accidents and gracefully understated decisions.

The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss

With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin?

Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for thought-provoking, clever and memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Below is a selection of current shows our team of editors can't stop talking about.

Suzanne Caporael at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, through Dec. 22 The various ways we mediate our world have long been the concern of painter Suzanne Caporael, who can give the most esoteric taxonomies for processing nature, in particular, a lyrical twist. Her means are whatever it takes - be that abstraction or representation, leaving her "signature style" tricky to summarize. In her multifaceted show "Seeing Things," she considers the gap between perception and cognition in angular and gridded abstractions, delicate landscapes and veiled allusions to such masterpieces as Cezanne's portrait of his wife and Watteau's "Pierrot."

These small collages are composed by the painter as studies for her larger canvases, but it’s hard to imagine that their successors could trump them in terms of spontaneity or sheer joie de vivre. Made from pieces of newsprint, in saturated hues of magenta, lime, orange, and navy, they are winningly simple with a powerful graphic punch—the abstract cousins of Saul Bass’s posters circa “Anatomy of a Murder.” But that mod sixties vibe is belied by the newspaper dates; the oldest is from 2008. Through April 21.

www.newyorker.com

Two exhibitions open this Thursday at Ameringer McEnery Yohe. Both of them merit your attention and attendance.

One of them features the work of Suzanne Caporael. "First and foremost, Caporael is a painter," says the gallery. "While maintaining a discrete distance from the art world in various rural havens, she has nonetheless earned herself a place in the field of contemporary painting. For nearly thirty years she has allowed her avid curiosity to guide her through a variety of disparate areas of study, most of which take two to five years of research and manifest as paintings while Caporael delves more deeply into her sources. These include eighty paintings representing thousands of miles of back roads traveled in the U.S. over a period of four years. Always remaining more allusive than descriptive, the work balances substance and subtlety with aesthetic rigor."

Featuring works by Suzanne Caporael

www.kemperart.org

New York-based Caporael is an inveterate road tripper (having covered some 30,000 miles in her lifetime), and she used her most recent cross-country excursion as the basis for the 12 paintings on display here (all 2009 or ’10). Despite their highly abstract forms, the canvases, some of them fairly substantial in scale (the largest are 60 inches tall) and many with thickly painted surfaces, manage to convey Caporael’s journeys in a way that feels as fresh and honest as a lap-held diary.