Wendy Sussman / Dan Connally August 4 - 28, 2004 Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings from the estate of Wendy Sussman. During her intense, interrupted career the talented painter exemplified extraordinary commitment to the painted image, earning the admiration of fellow painters and inspiring many devoted students. This exhibition, three years after Sussman's death, provides a welcome chance for the public to rediscover her exceptional paintings. Her canvases are usually large, sometimes ten feet long, with masterfully textured surfaces of mainly one color: gray,cobalt blue or white. (Her last paintings featured a brighter palette of yellows and oranges.) Sussman's richly painted, nearly abstract fields are often inhabited by a small head, the figure of a toy medieval jousting horse, or a small demon. These images are dwarfed by the vastness of the picture plane. "...They're about another being, a being who's striving. Maybe I'm looking straight into the face of something that's in me that I don't know anything about..." describing the experience of the horse head image or of the little demon, she added, "...(it's) very similar to this feeling of looking into another world, at another species, and seeing this other world that seems so different. You don't want to go into it. It's like another world of consciousness, and that's what death is, what you imagine it to be." -From a published interview in Deus Ex Machina. Wendy Sussman taught as a tenured member of the Faculty at the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Raised in New York, she received an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1979 and taught at the Pratt Institute before joining the Berkeley faculty. In 1986 she won a Rome Prize fellowship and studied early Renaissance painting . In Rome she redefined her practice, influenced by fellow resident artists Martin Puryear, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Mel Bochner. Sussman exhibited a one-person show at the Jewish Museum, San Francisco and was awarded Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships and a Pollock-Krasner Grant. Image above: Wendy Sussman,1999, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 50" x 48" Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Dan Connally. In Gallery II, Connally will show several small colorful paintings on wood, each framed by the artist as if to address their traditional role as objects contemplated in the manner of art appreciation. In any other sense, Connally's paintings are not conventional and provide the viewer with unexpected possibilities. They remind us of multiple periods and genres, and offer engaging references to both representation and abstraction. They can be humorous and straightforward. Dan Connally's small contemplative compositions imply that the viewer is looking into more than just invented abstract space. Whether viewed as an ambiguous landscape or nature morte his works are playfully developed with objects or shapes only slightly defined by outline and color. Both the forms and palette of Connally's paintings pay reverence to earlier painting, at times early Renaissance or early 20th Century. The results of Connally's process and respectful allusion are richly meditative, exploratory pictorial spaces. Connally teaches painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught periodically in Italy, studying the masters with a modernist's eye. A reception will be held on Thursday, August 5th from 5:30 to 7:30pm. Image above: Dan Connally, Semaphore, 2004, 36 1/2" x 38 3/4", Oil on board.