Susan Weil. Now And Then

About

Susan Weil is best known for her fearless experimentation with new techniques and use of unconventional materials, both of which have been consistent themes throughout her storied sixty-year career. Weil creates dynamic, multi-dimensional works that compel the viewer to contemplate numerous perspectives at once. She often fractures the picture plane, deconstructing and reconstructing images using collage, blueprints, wood, acrylic and paint on recycled canvas.
 
For this exhibition, the New York-based artist has produced new work, including three engraved spatial pieces that highlight her love of drawing. Always willing to try new mediums, she uses malleable poplar plywood, bent and formed to breathe movement and dimensionality into a trio of refined line drawings. Once shaped, these sculptural works come alive, seemingly twisting and pulling free from the wall that holds them.

Leftovers (2015), inspired by The Last Supper, pays homage to Leonardo da Vinci. Here, Weil takes one of the most iconic paintings in history, strips it down and injects her own visual vocabulary, focusing on the Apostle’s hands (hands are a recurring theme in her work), as well as the image's innovative use of perspective. Weil also adds an element of playfulness, as she says of her “collaboration” with the master painter: “He brought the supper and I made the leftovers.”

Many of the earlier works in the show reference perennial themes in Weil’s practice, including nature, literature and her own personal history. In Dream (2008), she reconfigures various used canvases and found bits of fabric into a singular composition with different histories that are seamlessly threaded together by paint and collage. The painting also echoes the staccato, rhythmic qualities of poetic verse that often find its way into her work.

Collaboration has always been an integral part of Weil’s practice. She was briefly married to the late Robert Rauschenberg, to whom she remained close after separating. The two partnered on several projects, most notably their celebrated blueprint series (1949–1951), which utilized a monoprint technique she had experimented with since childhood. Weil continued to expand on this cyanotype photographic printing process in her later work, including in her collaborations with photographer José Betancourt. The two worked together for more than a decade, producing such works as Spring/Sprung (2009) and Penumbrella (2009). Other works from the series were part of an extensive traveling exhibition in 2014, organized by the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina.
 
Susan Weil: Now and Then also includes a selection of the artist’s journals, which have been part of her artistic practice throughout her career. They contain daily entries of thoughts, sketches and her poemumbles, the artist’s unique form of poetic expression that became the subject of an exhibition at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2015.