Suzanne Caporael: Roadwork

Reception, October 11, 6 – 8 PM

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present “Roadwork”, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Suzanne Caporael. The exhibition is on view form October 11 - November 10, 2007. A fully illustrated color catalog with text by the artist will accompany the exhibition.

In her 25 year career, the work of Ms. Caporael has established her reputation as among the most peripatetic of artists. Shifting easily, even defiantly between image and abstraction, she has explored the properties of sea ice, pigment chemistry, estuaries, etc., and most recently, issues of time and place. These new paintings were conceived during a 7,000 mile road trip she made with her husband, novelist Bruce Murkoff.

Caporael focuses on what she sees as a point of contention between memory, which has no material properties, and the present, which is always under construction. Acknowledging the refusal of memory to follow a logical sequence, Caporael has constructed a body of work in which the subtle deployment of simplified abstract forms first triggers, and then subverts recognition. In her brief text, (a mixture of road journal and running commentary) she describes what she sees on the road, and the development of the paintings - how they took form, not from specific places or encounters, but from colored scraps of advertisements clipped from the New York Times over the past few years - a process the artist refers to as “accidental metaphor.” Those scraps of color, greatly enlarged as paintings, take on architectural and landscape implications, and, combined with place name titles from disparate American locations from Birmingham, Alabama to Wilderado, Texas, employ a richly nuanced surface to engender a sense of time and place remembered both longingly and incompletely.

Suzanne Caporael was born in New York in 1949. Her father’s career as a civil engineer moved the family more than 25 times before settling in California in the late 1960’s. The artist currently lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York, and still spends a lot of time on the road.