Suzanne Caporael: Seeing Things

McENERY

AMERINGER

YO H E

525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

SUZANNE CAPORAEL

SEEING THINGS

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I.Suzanne Caporael’s paintings resist containment by such familiar categories as abstrac-tion or representational. There is another category that her work belongs to, but so far no one has adequately named it. While viewers can recognize her paintings as hers alone — they are distinctive in that regard — she has neither developed a signature style nor branded herself throughout thirty years of exhibiting, ever since Paul Schimmel selected her for a solo exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1984. Such independence alone is remarkable.

Caporael has made paintings based on collages that she made while on a long road trip through the United States, using color swatches sans words — Starbuck’s green, Tiffany blue and Verizon red — from advertisements in The New York Times. The focus of an-other group of paintings, collectively titled “Littoral Drift,” was the estuaries where the exchange between ocean and rivers form a unique environment. The source of these paintings was Shallow Water Dictionary (2003) by John Stilgoe. In still another group of paintings, she focused on the table of periodic elements. Caporael makes unpredict-able choices that, like all strong artists, make sense in hindsight.

Caporael’s paintings are motivated by her curiosity. Particular branches of science, the relationship between sight and memory and between the landscape and the things that occupy the landscape have all been experiences she has focused on. Painting is the means by which she investigates a recurring theme in her work — what does it mean to see? What is the gap between seeing and knowing, seeing and remembering? It is a multifaceted inquiry that, on a deep level, can only be satisfied temporarily.

II.In this group of thematically related paintings, collectively titled “Seeing Things,” dating from 2011 — 2012 and ranging in size from 30" x 20" to 90" x 60," Caporael explores “the illogic of perception,” as she writes in a letter to her daughter-in-law. The space she is interested in isn’t located in the eyes but in the space behind the eyes. For her, seeing is both a physical and cultural act. More than that, seeing is an active rather than passive engagement. Through her subject matter (the what) and use of paint (the how), Caporael makes all of this evident in her work.

Never a purist, she will draw and paint in the same work, apply the paint thickly in one composition and thinly in another. The focal point of her inquiry is what shapes her approach. For the most part, her vocabulary consists of differently colored geometric shapes and lines of varying widths. My eyes may rest on the subject, but I inevitably be-gin to take it apart and investigate how the painting has been constructed. I take note of the specific shapes as well as the movement and thickness of a line, and whether or not it is blurred along the edges. This is the deep pleasure — at once cerebral and sensual — that is integral to the experience of Caporael’s paintings.

Caporael enables us to co-construct her paintings by opening up a space in which we see ourselves seeing one of her works. There are the elements with which she puts the painting together, and whether it is a circle, a line, an ellipse, a triangle or a rectangle of thick tur-quoise paint, each element defines itself independently while taking its place as an element of something larger. Our attention refocuses on the changing relation of part to whole.

A simple line might demarcate the doorway of her studio or trace out letters. In 629 (Tree), 2012, she uses abstract marks — diagonal lines with ragged, geometric shapes nestled in between — to evoke a tree. Other times, her linear configurations become

THE DYNAMICS OF SEEING

John Yau

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variations on an instrument used for the display of executed criminals, as the subtitle of 628 (The Gibbet), 2012, suggests, or they reiterate her own version of the plus-minus sign we associate with Piet Mondrian. And yet, even as I disentangle the “gibbet” from the painting’s interlocking, maze-like repetition of variously colored lines, I am aware of its resistance to being extricated. Embedded within a pattern of different-colored verti-cal and horizontal lines, where does the “gibbet” begin and end?

This unstable, fluid relationship raises fundamental questions. Do we see something because it’s there? Or is it there because we see it? Must we name the thing in order to see it? Or is seeing without naming enough? Such heightened seeing can approach the hallucinatory without tilting into that realm.

III.Caporael’s colors are saturated, matte, often applied in a way that can infuse a form with a ghostly presence, like an afterimage. She has worked with simple primary, sec-ondary and even tertiary colors as well as the full range of manufactured colors or what Lisa Lee called “Pantone Swatches” in her essay on Caporael, “Frontiers.” In that same essay, Lee makes a point worth repeating and expanding upon:

“Caporael gives a soft edge to her forms, and brushes the medium outward to create a blurry halo. The contradiction between the hard-edged cuts of the scissors, which are maintained in the contours. And the subtle erosion of the boundaries pushes these paintings toward a sensuousness and opticality that belong uniquely to painting.” 1

I do not think Caporael’s commitment to painting — and what “belong[s] uniquely” to it — can be overstated. What distinguishes her work is its unique combination of playfulness, seriousness, intellect and sensuality, all of which she underscores with her inimitable abil-ity to make paintings that are accessible and mysterious, immediate in effect but rather slow to reveal themselves. Painting is the way she clarifies things for herself.

IV.Seeing is not singular. Looking at a landscape is a different experience from working on a computer. 620 (Motion Illusion), 2011, the first painting in the group Seeing Things, can be read three ways. Caporael frames a pulsing rectangle of haloed black and white circles on a gray ground. Black trapezoids are on the sides, with white ones on the top and bottom. A gray band, slightly wider than the width of the rightmost black trapezoid, spans the paint-ing’s entire length.

In the initial reading of the painting, the trapezoids slant in, pushing the rectangle to the far end of a box. In the second reading, which contradicts the first, the trapezoids slant out, resulting in the rectangle as the top of a four-sided pyramidal structure. Finally, the gray band on the right contradicts both readings, suggesting that the black trapezoid, which it spans, can close, like a door, or that the gray band in its entirety (with the black trapezoid inside it) can open out, like a flap. These last two readings depend on whether we consider the gray band to be solid form or shadow. Each reading is the outcome of a decision; it requires us to become active participants rather than passive witnesses.

Although this was probably not the artist’s intention, Caporael’s use of trapezoids can be read as an implicit criticism of Op art. She is not interested in exploiting the gap between seeing and understanding, a common motif of Op art, but in learning how we

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see what we see. The illusions of a swelling or warping picture plane — typical Op art devices — are nowhere to be found in 620 (Motion Illusion). Any movement conveyed by the painting requires the viewer’s engagement.

In 621 (Red Pitcher/Can), 2011, Caporael paints a cylinder made of three distinct sections, all the same shade of red. The top section is an oblique ellipse. A curving white band (or the painting’s ground) separates it from the rectangle below, which of two similarly colored red sections, the smaller one fitting inside the larger. The smallest section of the cylinder is a sharply tapered scalene triangle with the narrowest angle at the bottom, pointing straight down. The triangle can be read as either the handle of a pitcher or a sec-tion of the can. At the bottom of the main or largest section of the cylinder the artist has outlined a faint semi-circle, whose bottom is defined by the painting’s physical edge.

What we see is both volumetric and flat, a pitcher and a can, a thing as well as a graphic sign. We are responsible for the way it is read, and certainly there is a pleasure to be had in putting it together in different ways in our mind.

V.In 622 (Pierrot After Watteau After Picasso After Gary Clarke), 2012, Caporael takes “Wat-teau’s slope-shouldered, arm dangling, slack-jawed, passive Pierrot” — as she writes in a letter to her daughter-in-law — and converts him into a grid of circular dabs of paint, while at the same time embedding him in it. Looking becomes an act of scrutiny — we need to discern and disentangle the figure, even as it hovers between legibility and illegibility.

Is it because of the lighter color of the dots defining Pierrot that the ground seems to be paler than in the surrounding area? At the midpoint of the ghostly figure, hovering near the contours of the costume, the artist has made two rectangles consisting of four round orangish dabs of paint, the hands. The face is made of sixteen circular orange and brown blips. This is as defined as the figure will get.

Embedded in the paint, the figure becomes a poignant reminder that we are trapped in our own materiality, that we cannot leave our bodies, however far the mind might be able to travel. At the same time, the circular dabs allude to the pixels and digital screens that have become a ubiquitous presence in our lives. However, by using paint in a way that under-scores its materiality, Caporael advances that a painting is not a purely optical experience, and that it links its corporeal existence to our own. In the face of time’s indifference, her Pierrot becomes — in its combination of specificity and anonymity — a surrogate for us all. The body, like the Watteau figure in the painting, is made of physical particles (atoms) rather than pixels (bits of light). One senses that Caporael believes that one of the things basic to painting — and not to digital media or other forms of technology-based art — is its ability to be both visual and visceral, that this is what makes it so basic and necessary. So while Caporael often uses a computer as an aid, she does not try to mimic its bodilessness. Nor does she parody Watteau’s painting. Rather, it is as if time has worn away his features and turned him into particles, reminding us of the transformations each of us will eventually undergo. This is the kind of looking most of us turn away from, preferring to find a way to be distracted, but which Caporael faces head on.

1. Lisa Lee, “Frontiers,” in Suzanne Caporael: Going (Chicago: Richard Gray Gallery, 2008), p.39

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John Yau is a poet, writer, critic, and the publisher of Black Square Editions. He teaches in the Visual Arts Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

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620 (Motion Illusion), 2011Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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621 (Red Pitcher / Can), 2011Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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622 (Pierrot After Watteau After Picasso After Gary Clarke), 2012Oil on linen72 x 64 inches

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623 (Artist ’55), 2012Oil on linen60 x 45 inches

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624 (Youth with a Wooden Leg), 2012Oil on linen60 x 45 inches

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625 (Red Flag), 2012Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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627 (Newton’s Bucket), 2012Oil on linen40 x 30 inches

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628 (The Gibbet), 2012Oil on linen60 x 45 inches

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629 (Tree), 2012Oil on linen90 x 60 inches

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630 (Urbanization), 2012Oil on linen60 x 45 inches

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631 (Newton’s Bucket 2), 2012Oil on linen40 x 30 inches

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632 (Home Field, Witnessed), 2012Oil on linen60 x 90 inches

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633 (Field 2), 2012Oil on linen60 x 90 inches

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634 (Mondrian’s Ghost), 2012Oil on linen90 x 60 inches

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635 (All), 2012Oil on linen40 x 30 inches

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636 (Hamnet and Judith), 2012Oil on linen40 x 30 inches

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637 (Aperture), 2012Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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638 (Studio Door), 2012Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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639 (Painting on Page), 2012Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

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640 (Madame Cézanne), 2012Oil on linen30 x 20 inches

These notes on the paintings are excerpts from letters

to my daughter-in-law, Anna Caporael, who sent me down

this wandering path in the first place.

S.C.

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October 3, 2011

Dear Anna,

Thank you for setting me thinking about all this.

For a start, I’ll need to make room for the illogic of perception. I’ve been reading neuroscientist Semir Zeki for the technical information, and that helps somewhat.

In the hierarchical order of all visual information racing to the brain, movement and color are in a dead heat. An evolutionary biologist would say that’s useful for spotting a tiger in the brush.

Absent a tiger in the brush, do we enjoy the illusion for atavistic reasons? Having studied many such illusions, I find I don’t enjoy them at all. There may be a limit to how far evolutionary biology goes in explaining our likes or dislikes, especially once sensory fatigue sets in. Nevertheless, I have decided to try for a motion illusion in the first painting.

I see that even when the fatigue sets in, I still respond. My eyes are fooled, even as I perceive the method of illusion, even as I see and feel my own brush in the act of creating the illusion.

620 (Motion Illusion)

October 15, 2011

What do you see?

Pitcher, or can, or something else entirely? There are multiple levels of intentionality in painting, ranging wildly between the visceral and the cognitive — and infinite combinations of the two — but all are dependent on imposing form on a surface.

Then comes seeing, which isn’t just eyeballing; it is the entire organizing principle that works to make sense of cues. It hardly seems like “work.” In fact, the pleasure of seeing can at times be so intense that even in the starkest hour it can feel like the basest decadence. I can go lolling around drunk on these cues: contrast, line, transparency, color… color?

Color? The more I read about it, the more my grip on understanding slackens. Why is red red? To truncate and crudely paraphrase the philosopher Philip Pettit’s paper, “Looks as Power,” red is red because all other colors say so — by saying they are not red.

621 (Red Pitcher / Can)

October 28, 2011

It takes so little to introduce ambiguity. There is the apparatus for seeing — the eye — and there is cultural seeing. We see what we know — via the confluence of memory and

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personal histories. If you don’t know Watteau’s slope-shouldered, arm-dangling, slack-jawed, passive Pierrot, you won’t find him here.

In an attempt to challenge recognition in the familiar, the visual information of Watteau’s original has been altered and reduced. Vision scientists call this low-level salience. Gary Clarke, who makes small digital images, call it “recognizability,” and he encouraged me to use his dot method to make a full-scale painting. I call it leaping from multiple points of departure — apprehension, preconception and curiosity.

And making it damn near blinded me.

622 (Pierrot After Watteau After Picasso After Gary Clarke)

November 2, 2011

Have you heard of this?

“Eclabousage: Paint Splashed or Splattered on a Surface.”

Ralph Mayer wrote in The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques (Third Edition): “In other others, too much frosting and not enough cake. I want to see what it feels like to paint ‘like that,’ but no matter how I frame the question I find I can’t paint as though the last sixty years didn’t happen. Maybe I just read too much.”

Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times (Jan. 13, 2012) that the original abstract expressionists were “painting monuments of ecstatic selfhood.” That particular chest-thumping emphasis seems to have left painting and moved on to the social arena.

Harry Cooper wrote in Artforum International (Jan. 12, 2011): “Painting today (forgive me) is too stylish, too self-conscious.”

I think Cooper called it. Perhaps it’s true that some of us are a little self-conscious to find ourselves “still painting,” but how does that old song go? “Fish got to swim, birds got to fly.” And that’s where we are now — a little embarrassed, but also wildly ecstatic, to “still” be painting.

623 (Artist ’55)

November 11, 2011

Do you remember this wooden pattern we found in the small barn? I used it to make a contrast between physical reality and painted illusion. The painting started out as youth with a wooden leg, but it turned out to be more like a youth or a wooden leg. Could it be that I’m the only one who sees the leg?

The wooden element of the painting is “real,” although not what it claims to be. The other part, the youth (gender unassigned), exists in fictional space. The eye has been demonstrated to be only one part of seeing — sort of a limited partner. Our “sight” is our focus, our choice. I choose the leg.

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Antoine WatteauPierrot, 1717-1719Oil on canvas723/8 x 58 3/4 inches

This might be the place where words come in. The eye and the brain do not passively record. The viewer perceives, and creates.

624 (Youth with a Wooden Leg)

November 20, 2011

According to some anthropologists, I can credit my pleasure in painting to rectangles, lines and illusionistic planes to my good fortune: I live in the built environment. No matter that mine is a rural environment; the point is I live in a house, not a mud hut or a cave. With the geometry of walls and roofs, my response is preordained.

This makes me wonder: What are the merits of “cultural relativism” to an artist? Does it explain why my sketchbooks are filled with drawings of dogs, landscapes, flowers and my grandson at his piano lesson? Demystification is not necessarily informative. I’ll have to think about it.

625 (Red Flag)

December 2, 2011

I try not to mistake visualization for seeing, but sometimes I find it necessary to visualize in order to see. Take Newton’s second law of motion — we’re supposed to understand the properties of motion by imagining a bucket at the end of a twisted rope.

In attempting to sort this out for myself (by drawing it), I am helpless to visualize the placement of the rope. Where does it hang? My pencils become shorter and shorter, and with no place to put the rope, I eventually lose sight of it. Without a frame of reference (Newton never stipulated its location), my visualization fails. I am left with an empty bucket in an empty space. Well, that plus a painting.

(Months later, I learned that the absence of the relative position of the rope is an old trope — and is often cited as “The Hole in Newton’s Bucket.”)

627 (Newton’s Bucket)

December 28, 2011

I won’t tell you what’s here, but once you see it, you won’t be able to “unsee” it. When the search for “sense” in an image is concluded, it cannot necessarily be held. In fact, you might rather let it slip through the bars for the simple pleasure of capturing it again.

628 (The Gibbet)

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January 6, 2012

I would approach a living thing with diffidence, but this is not really a tree. It is nothing Linnaeus would have recognized, but is something I am trying to see with my mind’s eye.

This house I live in is surrounded by trees. Inside, I am surrounded by books. Trees, paper, books. I should poke out my mind’s eye with a stick. I should consider this painting a memento.

Langston Hughes knew that the difference between a living tree and a piece of paper is death. A book is a dead tree with words on it.

Looking at trees I am grateful for the trees that gave the words a place to be. So, memento it is.

629 (Tree)

January 12, 2012

What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. Response came first, recognition later. I received a letter from John Stilgoe (writer, professor, friend), and enclosed was an essay he had written, “On Not Perceiving Urban Color,” that had recently been published. Compared to his brain, mine is a rudimentary piece of equipment. I may be a cart with square wheels, but his essay sent the square wheels spinning, and they led here.

630 (Urbanization)

January 28, 2012

I just can’t leave that bucket alone.

I’m still painting it. Still thinking about it. Motion arrested is not motion.

631 (Newton’s Bucket 2)

February 4, 2012

I hadn’t thought of this before, but all art was originally conceptual. It was either imaginary or notational. The perspective, lighting and rendering that were the pride of the Renaissance was a deliberate departure from all you can imagine to all you can see — except for the angels, of course.

Just before the Renaissance, medieval artists began to alert their viewers that what was depicted in their drawings was actually witnessed by the artist.

This idea of direct observation, which we take for granted, was once fresh. Learning this, thinking of the artists’ excitement, makes it fresh for me. With paper and pencil, I sat on a hill above my house and witnessed this view. In the process, I remembered what my math

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teacher, Sister Mary Michael, said to me fifty years ago: “A line is a point moving through space, trailing its history behind.” She was good.

632 (Home Field, Witnessed)

February 29, 2012

Why this and not that? Seeing, like painting, starts with a question. Looking, or more correctly, deciding where to look, is a choice nicely suited to the activity of painting.

The true plane, which is the surface of the painting, has bright color, plus the challenge of pattern recognition, to recommend itself to the eye’s attention. But, the obstruction of the sight lines is also at play. The false plane, that old seducer, offers up the comfortable recognition of a traditional landscape, and doesn’t even use a convincing illusion to do it.

Where to look, where to look? Foreground or background? Apparently, we are not allowed both.

633 (Field 2)

March 1, 2012

Ernst Gombrich puts “finding” before making, and there it remains. I found Mondrian in a swatch of twill. His ghost, a looming presence (having the phenomenology peculiar to ghosts), can inhabit the largest places, the smallest place and even the non-places — including the unmoored notions adrift in our minds.

We can read about an image, or we can read the image. I find myself doing both.

634 (Mondrian’s Ghost)

March 21, 2012

I’m noticing that writers on the subject of perception are very interested in the appearance of words. There seems to be a general consensus that words, such as those on a page, are still, i.e., not moving. That makes sense. But it has been proposed that to attach a word to a space that is not a page obliterates the ground and attaches it to a new mental state — that of motion. The word becomes an object, speeding through fictional space.

Really? I have to see this for myself, so I paint. What I see is this: A text painting is an orphan bastard, a sterile mule. It can only sit repeating itself, but who would pass up a peek at an orphan bastard, especially a good-looking one? Whether or not it “says” anything seems to me to be more dependent on the viewer than on the grounding. What I get out of it is a lesson.

635 (All)

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April 13, 2012

You know I don’t usually title my pictures, but, when confronted with things that are the same, only different, names are useful classifiers. (Hamnet and Judith are the names of Shakespeare’s twins).

Paintings, with their immobile faces, make the best liars. By virtue of the boundary strength between similar light and dark shapes, this one invokes the twin-ship of a reflection. A longer look exposes the lie. But even when exposed, the lie stands — because the eye, too, is a liar.

636 (Hamnet and Judith)

May 2, 2012

This challenge you gave me, changing focus from painting to painting, has got me thinking: Allusion is kinder than illusion. It is less confrontational, more a gentle push than a shove, but it is also more difficult to recognize at first meeting — especially in the current climate of spectacle.

Illusion makes a consumer of the viewer. Allusion makes him a critic.

637 (Aperture)

May 11, 2012

Look at that. Despite the fact that it lacks descriptive color, texture, depth or size, despite even the deliberate miscued perspective, the eye reads the lines as representation: door. I certainly meant it as door, and when I showed it to B, he saw it as a door. But the next person saw something else.

Where no space exists, we push into the surface, not with our eyes, but with our minds. And, having accomplished this minor leap, the mind is pleased with itself, limbic system all charged up.

638 (Studio Door)

June 8, 2012

Rothko said anything worth doing is worth doing again.

I think he meant a particular painting, but for me it means returning to a problem. In this case, I wanted to revisit the word as object.

Seeing comes before words, and we use words to describe seeing. This painting is a reconstruction of the page. The paint is my text on the page.

639 (Painting on Page)

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July 7, 2012

I’ve been looking at reproductions of this painting since I was a kid. Striped down to contours, Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne reveals the artist’s commitment to his perception — his perceptual truth — of the object (his wife).

What his contemporaries called errors are really facts about seeing, the single most important of which is vantage point. “Any movement determines a set of changes in perceived aspect,” (Alva Noë). I am convinced that Cézanne was perfectly cognizant of his vantage point(s). He was able to use the conventional language of representation to imply that the fixed point of view is not “truth” — that perception is, above all, dynamic.

Madame Cézanne in her armchair is as still as a stone. Certainly he could have corrected that disjunctive line behind her, but he kept the line that demonstrates two different vantage points — and revealed himself in motion.

We must keep moving.

640 (Madame Cézanne)

August 1, 2012

Dear Anna,

Keep moving I will, but for now I am out of linen.

Your thoughtful questions and comments continue to inspire.

Love,

S

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Paul CézanneMadame Cézanne in a

Red Armchair, 1877Oil on canvas281/2 x 22 inches

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1949 Born in Brooklyn, NYLives and works in Stone Ridge, NY

Education1979 MFA, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, CA1977 BFA, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, CA

Selected Solo Exhibitions2012 “Seeing Things,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY2010 “The Memory Store,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2008 “Going,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL2007 “Roadwork,” Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY2006 “Time,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL2005 “Reading Time,” Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY and St. Louis, MO “Works on Paper,” Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM “A Decade,” Lemberg Gallery, Ferndale, MI2004 “Tide Waters,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL “Estuaries,” Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR2003 “Littoral Drift,” Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY “Recent Prints,” Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.2001 “Turnagain Arm and Other Cold Places,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL2000 “Melt: New Paintings,” Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA1999 “Studies for Melt,” Karen McCready Fine Art,” New York, NY1998 “The Elements of Pigment,” The Lemberg Gallery, Birmingham, MI; Richard Gray

Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA1997 “Recent Paintings,” In Khan Gallery, New York, NY “Suzanne Caporael,” SOMA Gallery, La Jolla, CA1996 “The Five Kingdoms and The Periodic Table of Elements,” Kohn Turner Gallery,

Los Angeles, CA; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1994 “Paintings, from the Series Inside Trees and Living on Permafrost: Black Spruce,” Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1993 “Inside Trees,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL1992 “Second Nature,” Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA1991 “Suzanne Caporael,” Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL “Paintings and Works on Paper,” Richard Green Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “New Work,” Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ1989 “Recent Paintings,” John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA “New Paintings,” Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ1988 “New Work,” Richard Gray Gallery/Superior Street, Chicago, IL “Recent Work,” Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA; Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art,

Santa Monica, CA1987 “Recent Paintings,” John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA1986 “Recent Paintings,” Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, Santa Monica, CA “California Viewpoints,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA1985 “Suzanne Caporael,” Irit Krygier Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA “Summer 1985: Nine Artists” (nine one-person exhibitions), Museum of

Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA1984 “Suzanne Caporael,” Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA

SUZANNE CAPORAEL

Selected Group Exhibitions2011 “(Un)Natural Histories,” Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO2010 International Exhibition of Visual Arts, The American Academy of Arts and

Letters, New York, NY2008 “People and Places,” Atrium Gallery, St. Louis, MO “New Prints: Spring 2008,” International Print Center New York, NY “Less is More,” 511 Gallery, New York, NY2007 “Empty Nest: The Changing Face of Childhood in Art, 1880 to the Present,”

Nathan A. Bernstein & Co, New York, NY, curated by Lowell Pettit2006 “Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art,” Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los

Angeles, CA2005 “New Art New York: Reflections on the Human Condition,” Trierenberg Holding

Inc., Traun, Austria2003 “Pressure Points,” The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX “Components,” Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR2002 “Linger,” Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY “Plotting: A Survey Exhibition of Artists’ Studies,” Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL2001 “On Language: Text and Beyond,” Center Galleries, Detroit, MI2000 “Identities: Contemporary Portraiture,” Palmer Gallery, New Jersey Center for

Visual Arts, Summit, NJ “Watch,” Bona Fide Gallery, Chicago, IL “Ellsworth Kelly and Suzanne Caporael,” Graystone Contemporary Art, San

Francisco, CA1999 “Retrospective of the Collection of David Teplitzki,” Boulder Museum of

Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO “The Great Drawing Show,” Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “A Quiet Storm: Painting in Abstraction,” Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA1998 “Cleveland Collects: Contemporary Art,” Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH “Hands on Color,” Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA1996 “Between Reality and Abstraction,” NICA Gallery, Las Vegas, NV “Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas,” Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY1995 “New Abstraction,” Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA1993 “45th Annual Academy Purchase Exhibition,” American Academy of Arts &

Letters, New York, NY “Sea Fever,” Transamerica Pyramid Center, San Francisco, CA1992 Inaugural Exhibition, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA “Selective Visions,” Transamerica Pyramid Center, San Francisco, CA1991 “Group Show,” Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Individual Realities in the California Art Scene,” Sezon Museum of Modern Art,

Tokyo, Japan “Selections From the Peter Norton Collection,” Rand Corporation, Los Angeles, CA “Presswork: The Art of Women Printmakers,” The National Museum of Women in

the Arts, Washington, D.C.1989 Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL1988 “Land,” ACA Art Gallery, New York, NY1987 Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL “Alumni Invitational,” Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, CA “Avant-Garde in the Eighties,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA

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Selected Public CollectionsArt Institute of Chicago, Chicago, ILCarnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WIDetroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MIFogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAHigh Museum of Art, Atlanta, GAHood Museum of Art, Hanover, NHLegion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CALos Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CAThe Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CAMilwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WINational Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CAPortland Museum of Art, Portland, MESanta Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CASan Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CAThe Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KYUniversity of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, NYWorcester Art Museum, Worcester, MAYale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Selected Awards1986 National Endowment for the Arts painting grant

Selected BibliographyArtner, Alan. “Attached to Ideas of Ice.” Chicago Tribune, 20 Apr. 2001.Artner, Alan. “Paintings Start With Tree Rings.” Chicago Tribune, 4 Mar. 1993.Artner, Alan. “Suzanne Caporael.” Chicago Tribune, 12 May 2006.Artner, Alan. “Suzanne Caporael.” Chicago Tribune, 8 Feb. 1991.Artner, Alan. “The Art of Making Objects About Painting.” Chicago Tribune, 5 May 1988.Artner, Alan. “Works’ Beauty Is in Their Simplicity and Deceptiveness: Suzanne

Caporael.” Chicago Tribune, 17 Oct. 2008.Baker, Kenneth. “Abstracts With a Hint of Nature.” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 Apr. 1996.Baker, Kenneth. “Galleries.” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 May 1987.Baker, Kenneth. “Nine Artists on the Loose in Los Angeles.” San Francisco Chronicle, 18

Jul. 1985.Baker, Kenneth. “Suzanne Caporael at the Wirtz Gallery.” San Francisco Chronicle, 26

May 1992.Barnes, Lucinda. “Visions of Psychic Energy.” Artweek, 19 Jan. 1985.Bob, Paul. “Suzanne Caporael.” Esquire, Jul. 1986.Bonetti, David. “Prints and Paintings Provide Strong Gallery Shows.” St. Louis Post-

Dispatch, 24 Apr. 2005.Brown, Julia and Jacqueline Crist. Summer 1985, Exhibition Catalog. Los Angeles:

Museum of Contemporary Art, Summer 1985.Caporael, Suzanne. “An Artist’s Forum of Ad Reinhardt.” Art Space Magazine, Jan. – Apr. 1992.Caporael, Suzanne. “Working Proof.” Art on Paper, Jan. – Feb. 2000.“Charles Rose: Orleans House.” Global Architecture: Houses 89 (2005).Clothier, Peter. “Suzanne Caporael at Irit Krygier.” LA Weekly, 14 Nov. 1985.Cohen, David. “Suzanne Caproael: Reading Time.” The New York Sun 13 Jan. 2005.

Conrad, Barnaby III. “Suzanne Caporael.” Horizon, Jan. – Feb. 1987.DeEtte, Christy. “Suzanne Caporael.” Art of California, 1992.Doll, Nancy. Suzanne Caporael, Exhibition Catalog. Los Angeles and Chicago: Kohn

Turner Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery, 1996. Einspruch, Franklin. “Real and Caporael.” The New York Sun, 13 Mar. 2012.Fox, Howard N. Avant-Garde in the Eighties, Exhibition Catalog. Los Angeles: Los

Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987.Fox, Howard N. California Viewpoints — Suzanne Caporael, Exhibition Catalog. Santa

Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1986.“Galleries — Santa Monica.” Los Angeles Times, 16 Sept. 1988.Gerstler, Amy. “Suzanne Caporael.” Artforum 27 (Dec. 1987)Glueck, Grace. “Suzanne Caporael: Reading Time.” The New York Times, 21 Jan. 2005.Goodbody, Bridget L. “Suzanne Caporael: Reading Time.” TimeOut New York, Feb. 2005.Hammond, Pamela. “Suzanne Caporael.” ARTnews, Summer 1991.Hawkins, Margaret. “Suzanne Caporael: Richard Gray, Chicago.” ARTnews, Sept. 2006.Heller, Tom. Suzanne Caporael, Exhibition Catalog. Newport Beach, CA: Newport

Harbor Art Museum, 1984.Hicks, Emily. “Suzanne Caporael.” The Contemporary, Exhibition Catalog. Los Angeles:

Museum of Contemporary Art, Summer 1985.Hodder, Monroe. “Inner Natures.” Visions, Summer 1996.Johnson, Ken. “Suzanne Caporael.” The New York Times, 14 Jan. 2000.Knight, Christopher. “Something for Everyone Group Exhibit at MOCA.” Los Angeles

Herald-Examiner, 26 Jun. 1985.“L.A. in Review.” Arts Magazine, Summer 1991.Levin, Kim. “Suzanne Caporael.” Village Voice, May 1997.McKenna, Kristine. “In Dreams.” Los Angeles Times Calendar, 1991. McKenna, Kristine. “The Art Galleries.” Los Angeles Times, 15 Nov. 1985.Muchnic, Suzanne. “Caporael Mysteries at Newport.” Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 1985.Muchnic, Suzanne. “First Slate of Summer 1985 at MOCA.” Los Angeles Times, 2 Jul. 1984.Muchnic, Suzanne. “Outside-In Tour of L.A. in ‘Summer 1985: 9 Artists.’” Los Angeles

Times, 22 Jun. 1985.New Work by Suzanne Caporael, Exhibition Catalog. Madison: University of Wisconsin-

Madison/Tandem Press, 1999.“Paintings by Suzanne Caporael at Newport Harbor Art Museum.” LA Weekly, 18 Jan. 1984.Plotting: A Survey Exhibition of Artists’ Studies, Exhibition Catalog. Chicago: Carrie

Secrist Gallery, 2002.Schmerler, Sarah. “Suzanne Caporael: The Memory Store.” Art in America, Mar. 2011.Suzanne Caporael: Going, Exhibition Catalog. Chicago: Richard Gray Gallery, 2008.“Suzanne Caporael: Littoral Drift.” The New York Times, 31 Jan. 2003.“Suzanne Caporael.” New Art Examiner, May 1992.Suzanne Caporael: Roadwork, Exhibition Catalog. New York: Greenberg Van Doren

Gallery, 2007.“Suzanne Caporael: The Memory Store.” NY Art Beat, 15 Nov. 2010.“Suzanne Caporael.” The New Yorker, 3 Feb. 2003.Suzanne Caporael: Tide Waters, Exhibition Catalog. Chicago: Richard Gray Gallery, 2004.“Talent: Mellow Marshes.” New York Magazine, 20-27 Jan. 2003.Temin, Christine. “Mystery and a Sock in the Eye from Caporael.” The Boston Globe, 1 Dec. 1988.Wei, Lily. “Empty Nest, Nathan A. Bernstein & Co.” ARTnews, Feb. 2008.Weinberg, Lauren. “Suzanne Caporael: ‘Time.’” TimeOut Chicago, 11-18 May 2006.“West Coast Art at the End of This Century.” Bijutso Techno, Jul. 1991.Wohlfert-Wihlborg, Lee. “At Home: L.A. Art.” Town and Country, May 1986.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

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ISBN: 978-0-9850184-2-9

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SUZANNE CAPORAEL

SEEING THINGS15 November – 22 December 2012