Suzanne Caporael @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC - "Proof" Exhibition

Suzanne Caporael: Proof

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

5 September - 26 October 2024

SUZANNE CAPORAEL

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

www.milesmcenery.com 

Suzanne Caporael @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Suzanne Caporael
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Through 6 July, 2019

SUZANNE CAPORAEL

747 (blue, 3), 2018

Oil on linen, 66 x 48 inches, 167.6 x 121.9 cm, MMG#30992

Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an exhibition of new paintings by SUZANNE CAPORAEL at 525 West 22nd Street, It is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Dr. James G. Snyder, and a poem titled Caesura by Sally Van Doren.

Suzanne Caporael’s new body of work, titled Blue Uniform, is both of the mind and of the senses. Characterized by deep blues and the decisive placement of simple shapes that seem familiar yet just out of reach, the paintings reflect and respond to the complex relationship between the quotidian surroundings of the quiet studio and the dissensus and visual chaos of the outside world. The polysemic titles which avoid description or meaning invite contemplation while revealing the artist’s long-standing engagement in the lexicology of form. Spare and deliberate, each image is intrinsic to its process and its properties of wood, linen and paint. This economy of means and meaning may be meditative or challenging. Suzanne Caporael consciously leaves that choice to the viewer.

The act of observation is an essential part of the process, and with it the hand of the artist progressively becomes visible to viewers. As Dr. James Snyder puts it: “Her paintings speak to us in conceptual terms, but their value is not reducible to their conceptual content. They present abstractions of ordinary objects while also reminding us that they were made by someone and that, similarly, they are being appreciated by someone. ”

With these new works, Suzanne Caporael continues to create paintings that both display and invoke a discipline of thought and makes us re ect upon our own perceptions. As noted in The New York Times, “Caporael’s paintings are a curious mix of the aesthetic and the conceptual ... the paintings are sensuous and lyrical as well as rigorously formal.”

SUZANNE CAPORAEL was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1949.

The artist completed her BFA and MFA at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. She had her rst exhibition in 1984, when her work was presented at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) by Paul Schimmel, then the museum’s director. She was awarded a National Endowment grant in painting in 1986, and she has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009, she was a guest artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Her prints have been published in collaboration with Tandem Press, Madison, WI.

Her work is represented in many major museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Legion of Honor / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Suzanne Caporael lives and works in Lakeville, CT, with her husband, the novelist Bruce Murkoff.

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.milesmcenery.com