SUZANNE CAPORAEL

New York, New York – Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of collages by Suzanne Caporael, which will open to the public on 15 March 2012 and will remain on view through 21 April 2012.

First and foremost, Caporael is a painter. 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 “Inside Trees,” “Estuaries,” “Ice,” “Time,” and most recently, the eighty paintings representing thousands of miles of back roads traveled in the U.S. over a period of four years. These series share common denominators: always remaining more allusive than descriptive, the work balances substance and subtlety with aesthetic rigor.

The current exhibition of Caporael’s work represents a departure of two kinds: first, as an endnote to that most recent series, and second as a look back into its beginnings.

Examining these modest newsprint collages allows us to take hold of what is most evanescent in art; the immediate response that precedes intent, and the impulsivity that engenders the intellectual and material refinement that is to follow. This is the point at which the personal narrative is subsumed while exposing an artist’s palpable necessity to create by any means, at all times and in all places.

Only a few of the hundreds of collages assembled for the Road series ever made it to their current state. They were developed en route from issues of the New York Times, which Caporael was surprised to find in convenience stores in even the most remote small towns. Most were never glued down. Some evolved to become paintings and, after serving their function, were swept back into the box of scraps the artist collected on these travels.

This small presentation of selected works provides an opportunity to glimpse the artist’s work taking its initial tactile form in an intriguing and intimate way.

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe exhibited the last of Caporael’s Road paintings in October, 2010, in The Memory Store. It is rare to see the beginning after witnessing the end of a series, but the poignancy of goodbye is mitigated by the anticipation of Caporael’s next move.

Caporael’s work is in the collections of The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others.

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March 15 – April 21, 2012

Selected Works

Press Release