Suzanne Caporael: Proof
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
5 September - 26 October 2024
No. 772, 2023
Oil on linen
66 x 54 inches, 167.6 x 137.2 cm
© Suzanne Caporael, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery
Miles McEnery Gallery presents Proof, an exhibition of new paintings by SUZANNE CAPORAEL. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Leslie Camhi and Stephen Westfall.
Proof, Suzanne Caporael’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, presents the artist’s latest exploration into the ambiguity of abstraction. The exhibition’s title sets the body of work within a mathematical framework—proofs, in their definition, are finite. Yet Caporael’s paintings pose more questions than answers: her shapes are unexacting with faded edges and hazily-rendered lines.
Suzanne Caporael’s schematic subjects are set atop a seemingly uniform backdrop of an intangible gray color, yet, with a comparative lens, they reveal as undulating between warm and cool. “She fleshes out areas of shape or bands with flat color applied by brush, often wiping paint away from the ground where she doesn’t want it. The wiping leaves an atmospheric film, a spare translucency that nests or imbeds the abstracted figures in a milky surround,” writes Stephen Westfall. The resulting paintings rely more heavily on personal intuition and association rather than fact of matter.
The artist’s Bauhaus-inspired paintings of floating shapes and geometric systems are not only beautiful but cognitively stimulating. Suzanne Caporael’s compositions are delicate yet assertive, alluring while allusive. Proof celebrates the existence of beauty in mathematics, and logic in art. The intellectually rich paintings revel in the art of human understanding and the power of multidisciplinary creativity in the pursuit of elegance and truth.
Leslie Camhi writes, “In person, her works exert a remarkable presence, similar to a stage actor’s charisma. Yet the dramas her works enact—foldings, crossings, vibrations, levitations, all of these spatial operations played out within the confines of the canvas’s two dimensions—are far from momentary. The painted surfaces, as softly seductive as human skin, have been built up layer by layer over time, revealing their secrets slowly. Whatever is going on in them keeps us looking.”
SUZANNE CAPORAEL (b. 1949 in Brooklyn, NY) received her Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. In 2020, Suzanne Caporael was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 1986, a Painting Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; Peters Projects, Santa Fe, NM; and Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago.
Suzanne Caporael has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the de Young and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Her work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others.
Suzanne Caporael lives and works in Islesboro, ME.
MILES McENERY GALLERY
515 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011