Suzanne Caporael
SUZANNE CAPORAEL
Seeing Things
November 15 – December 22, 2012
Selected Works
Press Release
click here to view the exhibition catalogue: www.issuu.com
New York, New York – Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Suzanne Caporael. Seeing Things will open on 15 November and will remain on view through 22 December 2012. A reception for the artist will take place 15 November, between 6:00 and 8:00 PM. The public is welcome.
A few years ago, Suzanne Caporael hit a patch of ice while driving on a rural road. As the car raced down a steep hill, she “saw” the landscape slowly dragged across her vision – as though her eyes were trying to hold her in place while the car continued its slide. The memory of that visual anomaly led her through a thicket of books and essays on the subject of visual cognition. Neuroscientists, magicians, artists and art historians, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists and evolutionary biologists, have all contributed to the literature on the eye—brain connection.
The eye is device, the brain interprets. Vision has its own peculiar language of cues, some straightforward and some more subtle. In her new paintings, Caporael grapples with these cues, and with the way in which time and cultural reference affect how we see what we see.
From the visceral to the deeply conceptual, the paintings present challenges to recognition and preconceptions. Some, like 632 (Home Field, Witnessed) are minimally descriptive. Others construct and reveal methodology of optical illusions, and a pair of “Newton’s Buckets” address the conundrum of rendering the strictly mental image. In 622 (Pierrot After Watteau After Picasso After Gary Clarke), fully seeing requires specific prior knowledge and 624 (Youth with a Wooden Leg) presents a choice between conflicting realities. Included are Caporael’s paintings alluding to and celebrating other artists’ engagement with the discordance between seeing and knowing.
Exploring the different pathways to seeing has led Caporael to soften her formalistic practice, and the result is a full-blown stylistic disparity well suited to her subject. The paintings do not look alike. Each is endowed with an honesty of purpose of its own. Confidently moving between the dynamic and the serene, Caporael reveals a flexibility and dexterity previously held at bay. The elegance remains, as does the scholastic rigor that has categorized each series in the artist’s 30-year career.
Individually these paintings ask questions that beget more questions. Collectively, they invite the viewer to share the artist’s journey – to see ourselves seeing.
Suzanne Caporael was born in the United States in 1949. She earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her work is represented in many major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.
The artist lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York with her husband, novelist Bruce Murkoff.
This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by noted poet, writer and critic John Yau.
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM and by appointment. Press contact: Thomas Quigley at TQ@amy-nyc.com
Publications
News
Suzanne Caporael
The New Yorker
4 April 2012
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.
Suzanne Caporael: Real, and Caporael
The New York Sun
13 March 2012
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."
Suzanne Caporael: (Un)Natural Histories
Kemper Museum
26 August 2011 - 4 March 2012
Featuring works by Suzanne Caporael
Suzanne Caporael
The Memory Store
Art in America, March 2011
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.