Head, 1990
Charcoal on paper
19-1/4” x 25-1/4” uf, 21”-1/4 x 27-1/4” fr
Two Horses, One Head and a Rose, 1996
Oil on canvas
72" x 86"
Untitled (Airplane on Black), 1998
Oil on linen
10” x 9”
Untitled (Black Head), 1995
Oil and wax on board
8” x 7”
Untitled (Black, Yellow, Blue Stripe), 1999
Oil on canvas
50” x 48”
Did You Catch Me Yet, 1999
Oil on canvas
120” x 60”
Untitled (Horizontal Stripe with Figure Lying), 2001
Oil on linen
10” x 20”
Untitled (Yellow Stripe with Animal Head in Center), 2001
Oil on linen
18” x 36”
During Wendy Sussman's 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.
Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
14 Geary Street | San Francisco, CA 94108 | 415.433.2710
