Silent Pictures An Exhibiton of Paintings Susan J. Sauerbrun
February 10 - March 4, 2006 Artist reception: February 11, 2006, 6-9PM.
Susan J. Sauerbrun's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Havard University, Harvard Business School in Cambridge MA, Mobile Livre in Philadelphia and many private collections.
She has shown her work in such diverse locations as the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Bronx Museum in New York. Sauerbrun is the recipient of a 2001 Pollock-Krasner Award, and she won the 2000 American Drawing Biennial in Williamsburg,Virginia.
She was Artist in Residence at the Henry Street Settlement in Manhattan and the Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx.
She is also a founding member and former board member of London's ACME Housing Association and the ACME Gallery from the artist's statement: "These paintings concern intellectual quiet. They are immediate, fresh, feral, quick, sensitive and silent. They are grounded, evolutionary and calm. Art is a private language. Speech codification (like bipedal locomotion) defines the human circumstance. The paintings are translations of that private language. Abrading sentiment from the technique turned blending of color into a whole new method. Scouring the surface of a painting forced the artist to "dissolve the romantic notion that suffering created the gap in which art takes place." With nothing left to loose, she let go. "Liberate the doubt and restricted excitment and taste the difference." The cumulative result of release was an increasingly deep and spacious quiet. Doubt and hope became wishful illusions. "Choose a habit and then try to break it.
Just prior to resolution, the painting engaged in adolescent rebellion and threated to riot. Then there was an ecstatic release of tension in both of us. Silence announced completion of each painting." The paintings are named after the artist's ancestors. They were ordinary people who stayed alive in some pretty heroic circumstances. They bore at least one child, and therefore she is alive now.
